Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

P U L I T Z E R P R I Z E - W I N N I N G AUTHOR OF

A THOUSAND A C R E S

ILEV

U.S.A. $ 2 6 . 9 5 CANADA $ 3 7 - 9 5

O

ver an extraordinary twenty-year career, Jane Smiley has written all kinds of novels: mystery, comedy, historical fiction, epic. "Is there anything Smiley cannot do?" raves Time magazine. But in the wake of 9/11, Smiley faltered in her hitherto unflagging impulse to write and decided to approach novels from a different angle: she read one hundred of them, from classics such as the thousand-year-old Tale ofGenji to recent fiction by Zadie Smith, Nicholson Baker, and Alice Munro. miley explores—as no novelist has before her—the unparalleled intimacy of reading, why a novel succeeds (or doesn't), and how the novel has changed over time. She describes a novelist as "right on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing," yet whose "job and ambition is to develop a theory of how it feels to be alive." I n her inimitable style—exuberant, candid, opinionated—Smiley invites us behind the scenes of I novel-writing, sharing her own habits and spilling the secrets of her craft. She walks us step-bystep through the publication of her most recent novel, Good Faith, and, in two vital chapters on how to write "a novel of your own," offers priceless advice to aspiring authors. I hirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel may amount to a peculiar form of autobiography. I We see Smiley reading in bed with a chocolate bar; mulling over plot twists while cooking dinner for her family; even, at the age of twelve, devouring Sherlock Holmes mysteries, which she later realized were among her earliest literary models for plot and character. nd in an exhilarating conclusion, Smiley considers individually the one hundred books she read, from Don Quixote to Lolita to Atonement, presenting her own insights and often controversial opinions. In its scope and gleeful eclec-

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ticism, her reading list is one of the most compelling—and surprising—ever assembled. I ngaging, wise, sometimes irreverent, Thirteen Ways is essential reading for anyone who has I ever escaped into the pages of a novel or, for that matter, wanted to write one. In Smiley's own words, ones she found herself turning to over the course of her journey: "Read this. I bet you'll like it."

I ane Smiley is the author of eleven novels as well as three works of nonfiction. She is the K^J recipient of a Pulitzer Prize and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. Smiley lives in Northern California.

Jane Smiley's A Year at the Races, Good Faith, A Thousand Acres, The Age of Grief, Duplicate Keys, and The Greenlanders are available in Anchor paperback.

www.smiley i oo.com

Jacket design by Gabriele Wilson

Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher, New York www.aaknopf.com 9/2005

"Jane Smiley is one of the premier novelists of her generation, possessed of a mastery of craft and an uncompromising vision that grow more powerful with each book." —THE WASHINGTON POST

B O O K S ISBN

AND

R E A D I N G

1-4000-4059-0

52695

A L S O

BY

J A N E

S M I L E Y

FICTION

Good Faith Horse Heaven The All-True Travels and Adventures ofLidie Newton Moo A Thousand Acres Ordinary Love and Good Will The Greenlanders The Age of Grief Duplicate Keys At Paradise Gate Barn Blind

NONFICTION

A Year at the Races Charles Dickens Catskjll Crafts

T H I R T E E N WAYS O F L O O K I N G AT T H E N O V E L

Jane Smiley

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Nove

Alfred N E W

A.

Y O R K

Knopf •

2 0 0 5

THIS

IS A B O R Z O I B O O K

PUBLISHED

BY A L F R E D

A.

KNOPF

Copyright © 2005 by Jane Smiley All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. www.aaknopf.com Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Editions Rodopi for permission to reprint an excerpt from the essay "Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses," by Julian Samuel from US/Them, Transition, Transcription and Identity in Post-Colonial Literary Cultures, edited by Gordon Collier. Reprinted by permission of Editions Rodopi. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smiley, Jane. Thirteen ways of looking at the novel / Jane Smiley.—1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 1-4000-4059-0 (alk. paper) 1. Smiley, Jane. 2. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Books and reading—United States. 4. Smiley, Jane—Books and reading. 5. Fiction—History and criticism. 6. Smiley, Jane—Authorship. 7. Fiction—Authorship. I. Title. PS3569.M39Z476 2005 8i3'.54—dc22 2005045181 Manufactured in the United States of America FIRST

EDITION

We are not told of things that happened to specific people exactly as they happened; but the beginning is when there are good things and bad things, things that happen in this life which one never tires of seeing and hearing about, things which one cannot bear not to tell of and must pass on for all generations. If the storyteller wishes to speak well, then he chooses the good things; and if he wishes to hold the reader's attention he chooses bad things, extraordinarily bad things. Good things and bad things alike, they are the things of this world and no other. -MURASAKi S H I K I B U , The

TaleofGenji

CONTENTS

1. Introduction 3 2. What Is a Novel? 14 3. Who Is a Novelist? 29 4. The Origins of the Novel 56 5. The Psychology of the Novel 83 6. Morality and the Novel 105 7. The Art of the Novel 128 8. The Novel and History 157 9. The Circle of the Novel 178 10. A Novel of Your Own (I) 204 11. A Novel of Your Own (II) 229 12. Good Faith: A Case History 250 13. Reading a Hundred Novels 270

CONTENTS

A HUNDRED NOVELS

1. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji 2. Snorri Sturluson, Egilssaga 3. Author unknown, The Saga of the People ofLaxardal 4. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron 5. Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes 6. Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron 7. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote, vols. 1 and 2 8. Madame de La Fayette, The Princess of Clèves 9. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and "The Fair Jilt" 10. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Roxana 11. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded 12. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling 13. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote 14. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 15. Voltaire, Candide 16. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker 17. Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses 18. The Marquis de Sade, Justine 19. Sir Walter Scott, The Tale of Old Mortality, The Bride of Lammermoor 20. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 21. Jane Austen, Persuasion 22. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 23. Stendhal, The Red and the Black 24. Nikolai Gogol, Taras Bulba 25. Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time 26. Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Pons and Cousin Bette 27. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre 28. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights 29. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair 30. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin 31. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale 32. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables 33. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary 34. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities 35. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, The Moonstone

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36. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons 37. Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin 38. Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, The Eustace Diamonds 39. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot 40. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women 41. George Eliot, Middlemarch 42. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina 43. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, The Awkward Age 44. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray 45. Bram Stoker, Dracula 46. Kate Chopin, The Awakening 47. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles 48. Joseph Conrad, Heart ofDarkness 49. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth 50. Max Beerbohm, The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson, or an Oxford Love Story 51. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier 52. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street 53. Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter, vol. 1, The Wreath 54. James Joyce, Ulysses 55. Italo Svevo, Zeno's Conscience 56. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India 57. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby 58. Franz Kafka, The Trial 59. Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers 60. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time 61. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover 62. Virginia Woolf, Orlando 63. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying 64. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, vol. 1 65. Mikhail Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don 66. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God 67. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart 68. P. G. Wodehouse, The Return of Jeeves, Bertie Wooster Sees It Through, Spring Fever, The Butler Did It 69. T. H. White, The Once and Future King 70. Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children 71. Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters 72. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

CONTENTS

73. Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows 74. Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate, Don't Tell Alfred 75. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird 76. Jetta Carleton, The Moonflower Vine 77. Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fellfrom Grace with the Sea 78. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea 79. John Gardner, Grendel 80. Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women 81. Naguib Mahfouz, The Harafish 82. Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea 83. David Lodge, How Far Can You Go? 84. Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent 85. Anne Tyler, Dinner at theHornesickRestaurant 86. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being 87. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John 88. J. M. Coetzee, Foe 89. Toni Morrison, Beloved 90. A. S. Byatt, Possession 91. Nicholson Baker, Vox 92. Garrison Keillor, WLT: A Radio Romance 93. Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum 94. Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance 95. Francine Prose, Guided Tours of Hell 96. Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life 97. Arnošt Lustig, Lovely Green Eyes 98. Zadie Smith, White Teeth 99. John Updike, The Complete Henry Bech 100. Ian McEwan, Atonement 1o1. Jennifer Egan, Look at Me Index 571

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1 • INTRODUCTION

he end of September is a great time to have a birthday if you want to be a writer. Jane Austen might be December 16 and Shakespeare April 23 and Charles Dickens February 9, but for a sheer run of greatness, I challenge anyone to match September 23 through September 30—F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, Marina Tsvetayeva, William Blake, and Miguel Cervantes. And, I used to add (to myself, of course), moi. There is also a gratifying musical backup—George Gershwin on the twenty-sixth, my very own birthday. I never hesitated to bring anyone who cared (or did not care) to know up to date on late September (Ray Charles, Dmitri Shostakovich) and early October (John Lennon) birthdays. It was rather like listing your horse's pedigree or your illustrious ancestors—not exactly a point of pride, but more a reassurance that deep down, the stuff was there, if only astrologically. But in 2001, the year I turned fifty-two, whether or not the stuff was there astrologically, it did not seem to be there artistically. All those years of guarding my stuff—no drinking, no drugs, personal modesty and charm, good behavior on as many fronts as I could manage, a public life of agreeability and professionalism, and still when I sat down at the computer to write my novel, titled Good Faith, my heart sank. I was into the 250s and 260s, there were about 125 pages to go, and I felt like Dante's narrator at the beginning of The Divine Comedy. I had wandered into a dark wood. I didn't know the way out. I was afraid. I tried hard not to be afraid in certain ways. Two weeks before my birthday, terrorists had bombed the World Trade Center in New York. Fear was everywhere—fear of anthrax, fear of nuclear terrorism, fear of flying, fear of the future. I felt that, too, more than I was willing to admit. I tried to remind myself of the illusory nature of the world and my conviction that death is a transition, not an end, to disci-

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pline my fears to a certain degree. And my lover and partner was diagnosed at about that time with heart disease and required several procedures. I feared that he might also undergo a sudden transition and I would be bereft of his physical presence, but I also believed that we were eternally joined and that there was no transition that would separate us. This is how we agreed to view his health crisis. Physical fears were all too familiar for me—I had been wrestling with them my whole life, but in the late 1990s, divorce, independence, horses, Jack, and a book called A Course in Miracles had relieved most of them. When I sat down at my computer, though, and read what I had written the day before, I felt something new—a recoiling, a cold surprise. Oh, this again. This insoluble, unjoyous, and unstimulating piece of work. What's the next sentence, even the next word? I didn't know, and if I tried something, I suspected it would just carry me farther down the wrong path, would be a waste of time or worse, prolong an already prolonged piece of fraudulence. I wondered if my case were analogous to that of a professional musician, a concert pianist perhaps, who does not feel every time he sits down to play the perfect joy of playing a piece he has played many times. I had always evoked this idea hopefully for students—however such a musician might begin his concert, surely he would be carried away by his own technique and mastery; after a few bars, the joy contained in the music itself would supply the inspiration that was lacking only moments before. But I didn't know that. Maybe that sort of thing didn't happen at all. I came up with all sorts of diagnoses for my condition. The state of the Zeitgeist was tempting but I refused to be convinced.* I reminded myself that I had lived through lots of Zeitgeists over the years, and the geist wasn't all that bad in California. The overwhelming pall of grief and fear and odor and loss reached us more or less abstractly. Unlike New Yorkers, we could turn it off and get back to work, or so it seemed. But perhaps I was sensitive to something other than events— to a collective unconscious reaction to those events that I sensed in the world around me? I felt scattered. Even after I lost my fascination with the images and the events, my mind felt dissipated and shallow. It didn't help that I was annoyed with everything other writers wrote about the tragedy. There was no grappling with its enormity, and everything everyone said sounded wrong as soon as they said it. After *I think now that for me, as for most Americans, the September 11 attacks were simply too huge to comprehend.

INTRODUCTION

this should come only silence, it seemed, and yet I didn't really believe that. I believed that the world was not now changed for the worse— that anyone who had not reckoned upon the world to deliver such a blow, after lo these many years of genocide, mass murder, war, famine, despair, betrayal, death, and chaos, was naive. I believed at the time that if the world was a little changed, then perhaps it was changed for the better. The images had gone global, moving many individuals to look within and find mercy and compassion rather than hatred and anger. Hatred and anger were the oldest old hat, but mercy and compassion were something new. If there was more of those, and there seemed to be, then the turning point had actually been a turning point. Only time would tell. At any rate, surely talking was good, writing was good. Communicating was good, the antidote to the secrecy and silence the terrorists had attempted to foist upon us. Perhaps, I thought, I would stay scattered until the collective unconscious pulled itself together and raised itself up and put fear aside. But really, events were events. I had known events and written through them, written about them, written in spite of them. I had grown up during the cold war, when obliteration seemed imminent every time the Russians twitched. I had an engagement photo of my parents from a newspaper; the headline of the article on the reverse side was "Russians Develop H-Bomb." Fear of terrorism, I thought, was nothing compared with the raw dread I had felt as a child. The problem with the novel was not outside myself, or even in my link to human consciousness. Perhaps, I thought, it was my own professional history. I had experienced every form of literary creation I had ever heard of—patient construction (A Thousand Acres), joyous composition (Moo, Horse Heaven), the grip of inspiration that seems to come from elsewhere (The Green landers), steady accumulation (Duplicate Keys), systematic putting together (Barn Blind), word-intoxicated buzz (The Age of Grief), even disinterested professional dedication (The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton). I could list my books in my order of favorites, but my order of favorites didn't match anyone else's that I knew of, and so didn't reveal anything about the books' inherent value or even about their ease of composition. I didn't put too much stock in my preferences, or even in my memories of how it had felt to write them. But I had penned a concise biography of Charles Dickens, and maybe I had learned from Dickens's life an unwanted lesson. I wrote the Dickens book because I loved Dickens, not because I felt a kinship

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with him, but after writing the book, it seemed to me that there was at least one similarity between us, and that was that Dickens loved to write and wrote with the ease and conviction of breathing. Me, too. When he took up each novel or novella, there might be some hemming and hawing and a few complaints along the way, but his facility of invention was utterly reliable and he was usually his own best audience. In the heat of composition, he declared almost every novel he wrote his best and his favorite, even if his preferences didn't stand. Toward the end of his life, though, his energy began to fail. When he was fifty, planning a new publication, he plunged rapidly into Great Expectations and wrote in weekly parts, modifying an earlier plan for the novel and producing a masterpiece largely because his journal needed it. When he began Our Mutual Friend a few years later, he was taxed almost beyond his powers. Several numbers were short, he complained of his lack of invention, and he didn't really like the novel much, though a case can be made (I have made it) that it is one of his most perfect. And he died in the middle of his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, having not quite mastered the whodunit form. Even Dickens, I thought, even Dickens faltered in the end, though you might say that he was careful and nurturing of his talents— abstemious and hardworking. He always deflected his fame a bit, wore it lightly. Was the lesson I had learned from Charles Dickens that a novelist's career lasts only a decade or two, can't be sustained much longer even by the greatest novelist (or most prolific great novelist) of all time? Look at them all—Virginia Woolf, twenty-three or twenty-four years. George Eliot, twenty years. Jane Austen, twenty years, Dickens, twenty-four years, Thomas Hardy, fifty years of writing, but less than half of that novels. James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Miguel Cervantes. Short short short. I had meant to write my whole life. Surely modern life and modern medicine and modern day care and modern technology and modern publishing would make Henry James the paradigmatic novelist, not Jane Austen. I wondered if novel-writing had its own natural life span and without knowing it, I had outlived the life span of my novel-writing career. Another thing I learned about Dickens was that after 1862, he began to live a much more active life than he had before. In 1856, he left his wife in a scandalous divorce and took up with a much younger woman. Sometime in the very early 1860s, the younger woman disappeared. Some authorities think that she and her mother moved to

INTRODUCTION

France and that Dickens visited her there, in a small city or town, and that possibly she produced a child. Dickens's work was based in London, his family was near Chatham in Kent, and his beloved was in France. Dickens traveled back and forth incessantly, sometimes spending only a few days in each place. He also embarked on several arduous dramatic reading tours. It may be that such a schedule dissipated his energy or his concentration. I found myself in that, too. Once, when I lived in Ames, Iowa, where errands were easy and day care was exceptional, I had hours on end in which to marinate my day's work. After I moved to California, gave in to my obsession with horses, and became a single mother, to fritter away an hour meant to fritter away most of the day's allotted writing time. Distractions abounded, and they all seemed important. But then, I had always had children, I had always had something else to do during the day—not riding and horse care, but teaching and professorial responsibilities. If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness. This was true of me. I took up each of my novels with unwavering commitment. I did not begin them by thinking I had a good subject for a novel. I began them by thinking that I had discovered important truths about the world that required communication. When I was writing Duplicate Keys, for example, a murder mystery, I was convinced of the idea that every novel is really some sort of mystery or whodunit because every novel is a retrospective uncovering of the real story behind the apparent story. I thought I might write mysteries for the rest of my life. When I was writing The Greenlanders, it was obvious to me that all novels were historical novels, patiently reconstructing some time period or another, recent or distant. Horse racing, medieval Greenland, farming, dentistry. I would get letters and reviews from all sorts of people who found themselves reading with interest about subjects they had never thought of before. But at the end of each novel, I would more or less throw down that lens along with that subject. My curiosity was always about how the world worked, what the patterns were, and what they meant. I was secular to the core, and I investigated moral issues with the dedication only someone who is literally and entirely agnostic would do—my philosophical stance was one of not knowing any answers and not believing that there were any answers. While I was writing Horse Heaven, though, I embarked on a spiritual discipline that was satisfying and comforting. I came to believe in

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God and to accept a defined picture of Reality that took elements of Christianity and combined them with elements of Eastern religions. It was not an institutionalized religion, but it was a defined faith and had a scripture. It was called A Course in Miracles, and it completely changed the way I looked at the world. The essential premise of A Course in Miracles is that God did not create the world and that the apparent mixture in the world of good and evil is an illusion; God is not responsible for apparent evil. In fact, the world itself and all physical manifestations are illusory, an agreedupon conceit that is useful for learning what is true and real, but otherwise a form of dreaming—bad dreaming. The essential falsehoods of the world are that beings are separate from one another, that bodies are real and of primary importance, and that the physical preexists the spiritual. A Course in Miracles, like many Eastern religions, maintains that the world, all physical things, all elements of the universe, and all dimensions, including time, are a mental construct, and that the Mind or the Source preexists matter and is connected to itself all the time and in every way. It took me about three years to turn my image of the world upside down and to become comfortable with this new way of thinking. It wasn't hard, though it was disconcerting at the beginning. The payoff, other than my conviction that these ideas were true, was that I grew less fearful, more patient, less greedy, and more accepting. I greeted events more calmly as a rule, and didn't feel that old sense of vertigo that I had once felt much of the time. I got analyzed, or therapized, or counseled. My counselor shared my beliefs. Together we fixed my relationships and my worldview. But perhaps the result was no more novels? Perhaps the novel is an agnostic sort of form that not only can't say much about God, but also is even uncomfortable with God as a shadowy background figure? I was eager to detach myself from my habit of having expectations, since I had found the disappointment of my expectations crushingly painful over the years, but I wondered if that also made my work less engaged. Was the old truism that I had hated so much really true, that art, or at least novelistic art, is created out of pain and lack? I had resented and resisted that idea for years; art, I thought, is created out of observation and insight. You don't write a novel to salve a wound, but to bear witness. Nevertheless, something another writer once told me niggled in my brain—I had met Peter Taylor toward the end of his life when we were both at the Key West Writers' Festival. I asked him if he had ever had a dry spell, and he said yes, for a few years in his forties and fifties,

INTRODUCTION

when he and his wife had a set of especially beloved friends and he was happy. If I had consulted my mother, she would have said that horses were wrecking my life at last. All through my horse-obsessed adolescence, she had opposed every horse fantasy I had, because women she knew had horse-crazy daughters who were in her opinion going nowhere fast. They were never going to be famous or accomplished, were always going to waste their lives riding. She had foiled me then and thought her victory was permanent—I went to the college where she hoped I would go, I became a novelist as she hoped I would, and I had had unlooked-for, vindicating success. Between 1977 or so and 1993,1 had lived what was essentially a domestic life—husband, house, and children, plus university teaching. I hummed along, apparently performing my duties, but really half absent. Always my mind was pondering whatever novel I was writing. Sometimes the preoccupation was like the after-vibrations of a rung bell—words or sentences I had written that day would recur and recur, and I would feel gratified or simply fascinated by them. At other times I would nurture the next day's work or plan larger plot twists or meditate over how to go on. My novels were unceasingly in my mind. Only at night did I exert myself to stop thinking about them, because if I allowed them in, I wouldn't be able to sleep. No doubt I appeared absentminded to my friends and family, but they didn't have anything to compare it to—that's just the way I was. After 1993, the horses intruded upon and then displaced the novels. My preoccupation went through several stages; fears and second thoughts, worries, anxiety combined with feverish research made up the first stage. I read horse books, horse magazines, got on Internet horse message boards. I cultivated equestrians and trainers and vets. Writing novels was now something I did when I was sitting at my desk, but not when I was cooking dinner or lying in bed. I fiddled around between Moo and Lidie Newton so much that my husband feared I might never write another book. Then I fell off the horse and broke my leg, so there was nothing really to do other than write Lidie Newton. And then came Horse Heaven, which was, for me, book heaven. I had successfully combined my two obsessions, and the result was pure joy every day. As far as I was concerned the book had only one flaw, that its composition ended far too soon, and I had to go on to something else. Whatever the lasting virtues of the book are (and I am no judge, especially of that one), it was perfectly suited to me and my

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sensibility. It was funny and poignant by turns, it had a large cast, it was written in the omniscient third person (which allowed stylistic exuberance), and it had horses in every chapter except one. Some readers have told me they are sorry when it ends, but no reader is nearly as sorry as I was. It was clear after that book that the appetite of the general public for horses horses horses could be satisfied rather easily. I could spend my life learning about horses, but not, perhaps, expressing what I've learned. But had the literary ruminations the horses had displaced been essential to novel writing? The answer to this depended on one's theory of creativity. I hadn't ever had much of a theory of creativity beyond making a cup of tea or opening a can of Diet Coke and sitting down at the typewriter or computer. The first and last rules were, get on with it. But perhaps that getting on with it that I had taken for granted for so many years was dependent upon those half-attentive ruminations during diaper changes and breadmaking and driving down the road? Or maybe teaching had stimulated me? Week after week for fourteen years I had expounded about writing, given tips, analyzed student stories, come up with suggestions, fielded questions. Both consciously and unconsciously, I had considered difficulties in my own writings and worked out solutions for them from rules I blithely laid down in class. I wasn't doing that anymore, either. Nor was I reading much fiction. Some of my reading time was taken up with horse books, but most of what I had to spare was going to research—the Civil War and Kansas, horse racing, Charles Dickens. In addition to not thinking much anymore about my own novels, I didn't think much anymore about anyone else's novels. I did construct a new theory of creativity. Its truth seemed borne out by the experience of writing Horse Heaven. Rather than planning and working out in advance, as I had done with most of my earlier novels, I willingly entered a zone of randomness. I sat down at the computer every morning, focused on what I had written the day before, and waited for inspiration. If it didn't seem to be precisely what I had expected, I went with it anyway. My pleasure in the process and the product was a revelation. I didn't need to plan! I didn't need to work something out! I could just put myself into the properly receptive state of mind and be given the words, the stories, the adventures! My joke was that my retired racehorse, Mr. T, was dictating from out in the barn; he was my muse—my inspiration, my expert, and my voice from beyond.

INTRODUCTION

A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice. The word "inspiration" is a metaphor for creativity—a nice one, the ingoing of breath and spirit, breath and spirit both being ubiquitous, available with only the most minimal involuntary exertion, as natural as life itself. Some writers wrestle with their muses, wrest stories from them. Others imagine their brains working, hydraulic pumps or clockworks or computers. A metaphor is a way of capturing a feeling in words, and creating is a feeling. I have sometimes imagined it literally as a feeling of the brain exerting itself as a muscle does. But all metaphors of creativity are both descriptive and prescriptive. A pool of ideas may run dry, a muse may desert, the mechanical brain may cease to work. Mr. T. died. Dickens was exhausted and frightened by his diminishing inventiveness. My own metaphor bothered me. Was I not receptive enough anymore? Worse, was what I was receiving not worth receiving? Time to face my real fear—that my book wasn't much good. I once heard Michael Chabon say that the idea for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay came to him suddenly and all at once; all he had to do was write it out. That had been my experience with several novels, and I had confidently stated more than a few times that the execution of a good novel was inherent in the idea from the first. But that was when I was certain all my ideas were good. It may come as a surprise to those who don't care for my work that I'd hardly ever doubted the significance of any idea I'd had, and I'd had very few ideas. I'd written twelve finished works. I'd had fourteen ideas. The two that did not make it into print were a novella about a woman who is married to a jazz musician (I wrote a rough draft, but when I reread it, it didn't seem to have a point), and a novella about a horse-riding Realtor (sixty pages that just kept expanding with no actual story). The structure of all of my completed novels was fairly apparent to me from the beginning, and I had written with an increasing energy and sense of direction as I went through the rough draft. My commitment, but also my sense of what I was doing, never really faltered—inventiveness was for elaborating or vivifying the original conception, not for conception itself. The different forms I used supplied what you might call craft interest. I would try a tragedy, or an epic, or a comedy. The rules for each were different, and so the technician inside me would have something to figure out. The inner citizen would take up social or cultural issues. The inner artist would focus upon more elusive elements of beauty, Tightness, truthfulness, newness. Each novel was an experiment in a

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particular form, sometimes a conscious contrast to the form I had tried last. I suppose I would say that the inventiveness and variety of literature itself produced a strong response in me; each novel was my answer to a particular literary proposition, a particular method of telling a story. I was not immune to criticism, but I saw many negative reviews as reader dissatisfaction with the parameters of a particular form. For example, comic novels often offend as many people as they please because each reader's capacity for tolerating irreverence is different; what seems tame to one reader seems right to another, what seems corrosive to one reader seems hilarious to another. Novels with a large canvas sometimes fail to provide an intense emotional experience; novels with a narrow focus can seem claustrophobic. Many reviewers and readers loved Horse Heaven, but others found it too confusing and were unable to get involved. And then, there were all the happy endings. I love happy endings and consider them a philosophical and aesthetic challenge, but they are disappointing and untrue to some people. Entropy or loss is more satisfying. That seemed to be the lesson of A Thousand Acres. Over the years, countless readers have come up to me and declared how much they love A Thousand Acres. I've always wanted to say, "Oh, you're kidding." I find that novel interesting, moving, and challenging, but I don't find it lovable, or even very relate-toable. I sometimes suspected that to love it is to reveal something unfortunate about oneself. But that isn't actually true. What many readers are responding to, I think, are focus and intensity. The novel has an unrelenting quality to it that is inherently involving and comes from the form of tragedy itself. Though I loved Horse Heaven, not everyone else did, so I took some of the negative responses to it as permission to write Good Faith, a smaller and more single-minded novel that made use of a story I thought was both interesting and important. I wrote up my proposal, sent it in, got my advance, and began. From the beginning, though, I was disappointed that it wasn't Horse Heaven. I made ethical artistic choices and proceeded in good conscience, but I didn't li\e it. And yet, the thing I wanted to do artistically intrigued me, and I felt it had to be done in a certain way to sustain the illusion of the novel. I considered my main character and narrator appealing. In his way, he was not unlike the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day, who tells a story on himself that he doesn't quite understand. But the stylistic pyrotechnics of Horse Heaven that I had enjoyed as much as anything I had ever written were

INTRODUCTION

not appropriate, and I felt diminished inventiveness as well as diminished pleasure. It was like dating someone new who was nice enough but not nearly as exciting as the old boyfriend who had moved to Europe. I stuck with it. I had gotten a third of the advance. My horse was not winning at the track; no other sources of income (such as movie deals) were presenting themselves. I pegged along, inventive enough to keep writing but not inventive enough to surprise myself. At the halfway mark, I stopped and read through what I had written. It was more interesting than I had thought. The energy of that realization pushed me forward another sixty pages. By now, though, I was looking for terminal symptoms. One day I waited for inspiration, got some, went off in a completely new direction, then had second thoughts the next day and tried something new. This was a symptom, indeed, a symptom that I didn't know what in the world I was doing, and it was way too late in the game for that. My heart sank. No, my flesh turned to ice. No, my eyes popped out of my head. No, my stomach churned. No, all I did was close the file on my computer and walk away. But that was very bad. I decided to read a hundred novels. This book is the fruit of that course.

2 • What Is a Novel?

SIMPLICITY

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n inexpensive paperback book from a reputable publisher is a small, rectangular, boxlike object a few inches long, a few inches wide, and an inch or so thick. It is easy to stack and store, easy to buy, keep, give away, or throw away. As an object, it is user-friendly and routine, a mature technological form, hard to improve upon and easy to like. Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book. As I line up my summer reading of thirty-four novels written in the twentieth century, I realize that I have gained so much and such reliable pleasure from so many novels that my sense of physiological well-being (heart rate, oxygénation, brain chemical production) noticeably improves as I look at them. I smile. This row of books elevates my mood. The often beautiful cover of a book opens like the lid of a box, but it reveals no objects, rather symbols inscribed on paper. This is simple and elegant, too. The leaves of paper pressed together are reserved and efficient as well as cool and dry. They protect each other from damage. They take up little space. Spread open, they offer some information, but they don't offer too much, and they don't force it upon me or anyone else. They invite perusal. Underneath the open leaves, on either side, are hidden ones that have been read or remain to be read. The reader may or may not experience them. The choice is always her own. The book continues to be an object. Only while the reader is reading does it become a novel. But it turns out that a novel is simple, too. A novel is a (i) lengthy, (2) written, (3)prose, (4) narrative with a {^protagonist. Everything that the novel is and does, every effect that the novel has had on, first, Western culture, and subsequently, world culture, grows out of these five small facts that apply to every novel. 1

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The longest novels that stand alone in one volume are just under 1,000 pages—Henry Fielding's Tom Jones* would be a good example. The shortest run under ioo pages—Joseph Conrad's Heart ofDarkness would define that end of the continuum. Most novels run 300 to 400 pages, or 100,000 to 175,000 words. If a competent reader can read 30 or 40 pages in an hour—that is, 12,000 to 20,000 words—then most novels take ten hours to read. Length is a bland and reassuring quality, but it is no blander or more reassuring than any of the other qualities. Prose, for example, is usually simpler to read and more casual than poetry. We are accustomed to reading prose, and we talk in a sort of prose. Narrative, too, is a natural form. People tell stories from their earliest years and continue to narrate as long as they can remember and care about sequences of events. Almost always, their stories have themselves or their friends as protagonists. A story requires a protagonist—that is, a human or a humanlike conciousness who acts or is acted upon in the course of the story. Most people with the normal brain development and structure that results in a sense of self live with a protagonist every minute of every day, and that protagonist—"one who feels {agon) for {pro)"—is himself or herself. A protagonist is the most natural thing in the world. Every novel has all of these elements. If any of them is missing, the literary form in question is not a novel. All additional characteristics— characters, plot, themes, setting, style, point of view, tone, historical accuracy, philosophical profundity, revolutionary or revelatory effect, pleasure, enlightenment, transcendence, and truth—grow out of the ironclad relationships among these five elements. A novel is an experience, but the experience takes place within the boundaries of writing, prose, length, narrative, and protagonist. The most necessary of the five qualities of the novel is writing. The paradox of writing is that it is permanent, and so it may be forgotten. Author and reader agree that images and ideas set down in writing may come and go because they do not have to be stored in memory. Hazy notions and vague pictures that have to do with the writing certainly remain in the memories of both author and reader, as do strong emotional impressions that author and reader alike feel upon reading

*For plot synopses of works discussed, readers may consult the section "A Hundred Novels" in the latter half of this book.

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certain sections of the novel, but exact wordings can be largely forgotten. The same is not true of poetry. A poem must be remembered word for word or it loses its identity. In fact, poetry is often learned and remembered word for word, as when students memorize Hamlet's famous soliloquy ("Who would these fardels bear?") in spite of the fact that they have only the dimmest idea of what the words mean. The words may have the power of an incantation even in the absence of comprehension. The memory, though, sets limits upon what is to be remembered. The history of epic poetry, for example, shows that poets used set forms, rhythm, rhyme, figures of speech, and already familiar stories as mnemonic devices to aid in both the composition and the transmission of poetry from poet to poet and from poet to audience. Novelists have no need to do so. Particular stylistic tricks or turns of phrase are not necessary as mnemonic aids to the continued existence of the novel, and so the author is free to explore language and ideas that are hard to remember in detail. The novelist can go on and on, adding scenes, ideas, characters, complexities of every sort, knowing that they are safe from the effects of human memory—they will exist forever exactly as printed and will not evolve by passing through the faulty memories of others. Writing allows the elaboration of prose. Since memorization is unlikely to begin with, it may be made all the more unlikely by the use of a style that is unmemorable. Prose slips by, common as water. Readers have no defense against it other than boredom. But because it is so common and often colorless, the writer can use it in many ways, from the blandest, most objective, reportlike purposes to the most vivid, evocative, lyrical purposes. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf famously exploited metaphorical and lyrical possibilities of English prose that Defoe and Trollope did not. Prose may slow down and quicken, invoke and state, flower into figures of speech, flatten into strings of facts, observations, assertions. It may pile detail upon detail or summarize years of action in a few pages (as in the middle section of To the Lighthouse). Prose usually privileges the sentence, using punctuation to define the beginnings, endings, and complications of thoughts, and sentences are easy. They are what we learn and, often, how we learn it. Even though we don't use them in speech as much as we think we do (in fact, people who talk in whole sentences are generally thought of as pedantic or "prosy"), when our thoughts assume formal shape, they organize themselves into sentences. Poetry, in its search for concen-

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tration and sharp effect, contracts. In prose, one thought leads to another—it expands. Although thoughtless expansion is a fault to be guarded against, inspired expansion gives us the novels of Proust and Tolstoy, or Laurence Sterne and Halldôr Laxness. Prose is both sneaky and powerful, and is naturally narrative, since sequences of events have some inherent organization, and it is naturally expansive, since events can often be broken down into smaller events and extended backward and forward in time. In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster writes of narrative—that is, of "what happened then?"—almost with contempt. Even the lowliest bus driver, Forster says, could show an interest in suspense, in a sequence of events. He almost admits to wishing that novels could be written without narrative, without what he seems to think is the lowest common denominator of art. But they can't be. It is not only that the novel was invented to tell a lengthy and complicated story that could not be told in any other way, it is also that without the spine of narrative logic and suspense, it cannot be sufficiently organized to be understandable to the reader. Even more basically, a sequence of sentences, which is the only form sentences can occur in, must inevitably result in a narrative. The very before-and-after qualities of written sentences imply, mimic, and require the passage of time. There are minimally narrative novels, but the more lyrical and less narrative a novel is, the shorter it is, until it becomes a short story, which may, indeed, dispense almost entirely with narrative and become a series of impressions or linguistic effects or rhetorical flourishes, as happened with American short stories in the 1960s and 1970s. Narratives are as common as prose; they are the way humans have chosen to pack together events and emotions, happenings in the world and how they make us feel. Even the most informal narratives alternate what happens and how it feels (or what it means) to some degree. Even the most formally objective narratives (such as police reports) imply the emotions that rise out of the events, when at the same time they are suspending conclusions as to the meanings of the events. Because narrative is so natural, efficient, and ubiquitous, it, like prose, can be used in myriad ways. The time sequence can be abused however the writer wishes to abuse it, because the human tendency, at least in the West, to think in sequence is so strong that the reader will keep track of beginning, middle, and end on her own. Nevertheless, the commonest bus driver can and often does take an interest in

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what happens next, and so because the novel requires narrative for organization, it will also be a more or less popular form. It can never exclude bus drivers completely, and is, therefore, depending on one's political and social views, either perennially compromised or perennially inclusive. Perhaps the most important thing about narrative is that it introduces the voice of the narrator. In every novel, some voice is telling the story. The narrator may or may not personalize his voice. He may try to let the story seem to tell itself, as Kafka does in "The Metamorphosis"; he may come forward in what seems to be his own voice, and talk about the characters as if he and the reader were observing them together, as William Makepeace Thackeray does in Vanity Fair, or Kate Atkinson does in Behind the Scenes at the Museum. He may tell his own story in the first person, as Ishmael does in Moby-Die^. In every case, the reader must relate somehow to the voice of the narrator. In every case, the story is colored by the idiosyncrasies of the narrative voice, and how those idiosyncrasies strike the reader. Even the blandest, or most charming, or most skillful narrators have their detractors, because this aspect of the novel is irredeemably social, and draws constantly upon the reader's semiconscious likes and dislikes. Some narrators offend, some narrators appeal, but all narrators are present, the author but not the author, the protagonist but not the protagonist, an intermediary that author and reader must deal with. The most obvious hallmark of novels is length. The novel was invented to be long, because what early novelists wanted to communicate could not be communicated in a shorter or more direct form, and also because length itself is enjoyable. The Tale of Genji runs 1,000 pages. Genji lived a long life and had many wives and concubines. His maturation and his greatness could not be depicted in fewer pages. Don Quixote is 700 pages long. Quixote's adventures and humiliations need to build upon one another. The paperback edition of Ulysses is 783 pages—the intricacies of Leopold Bloom's day out in Dublin require it. Length, too, is simple. It begins as a mere adding on, though adding on may quickly turn into elaborating or digressing or complicating or subordinating and analyzing. For an author, adding on may amount to no more than keeping going, day after day accumulating episodes and stories, getting paid by the word and so writing more words. For a reader, adding on may offer primarily the pleasure of familiarity—the

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characters or the narrator's voice or the author's way of thinking become something the reader wants to continue to experience. In a novel, length is always a promise, never a threat. When the protagonist enters, a novel becomes spécifie, and even peculiar, and loses the generality that the other four elements seem to offer. The protagonist shapes the other four elements to himself. The narrative must be appropriate to him—it must grow out of his circumstances and teach him something. He must interact with the elements of the plot in a believable as well as an interesting way. The narrative and the protagonist are the chicken and the eggy the thesis and the synthesis. Neither precedes the other, nor exists without the other. A generic story line—for example, "a stranger comes to town"—becomes illuminating and interesting only as it becomes characteristic, only as it becomes the sole property of a particular protagonist. Similarly, the protagonist must prove himself worthy of the length of the novel written about him. If he is trite or blandly conceived, if he doesn't grow as the novel gets longer, the reader will lose interest in him. (It is true, though, that the novelist doesn't rely solely on psychological complexity to maintain the reader's interest in the protagonist. He may substitute sociological complexity if his theory of human nature is more realistic than romantic.) The length of a novel can become a problem for the protagonist—the author and the narrator may be tempted to leave him behind (as Cervantes sometimes puts Don Quixote to sleep when the other characters wish to talk about love problems). In some very long novels, the protagonist's role grows nominal as the landscape fills up with fellow characters and their stories take precedence over his. Even so, the protagonist, as he originates the story line and its circumstances, always remains the organizing figure in the novel, and the main plot must resolve his dilemma, however many other dilemmas it also resolves. The protagonist is the fulcrum of the author's relationship to the narrator, and the prose, or style, of the novel continuously presents the shifting balances among the three. The prose, like the narrative, must be appropriate to the protagonist. It must express something about him that it could not express about any other protagonist and demonstrate his worthiness to be the protagonist. In some sense, the author, the narrator, and the protagonist are always in a state of conflict that is always being reconciled as the narrative moves forward. Henry

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James's The Portrait of a Lady is a good example of this conflict. The evidence is that James himself is sympathetic to Isabel Archer from the beginning to the end of the novel. He portrays her as especially attractive, having qualities of innocence, beauty, and charm that set her apart from women around her and that appeal to men and women alike. More important, she is potentially courageous—that is, the quality of courage is within her, but she has not had much occasion to exercise it as the novel opens. James the author wants Isabel to demonstrate certain ideas he has about the way the world works in general and about the psychology of women like herself in particular. James the narrator defines and redefines Isabel's qualities by the extensive use of analysis, especially by analogy and extended metaphor. James the narrator deems it his job to talk about Isabel (and everyone else) unceasingly, to characterize everything she does and thinks in relation to some norm of thought and behavior (represented by several of the other characters). This habit of James the narrator does not serve Isabel over the long haul of the novel, in fact eventually works to demean her. Her courage does come into play several times, in her unhappy relationship with Gilbert Osmond, but by that time the fact that James the narrator has always stayed one step ahead of her by so relentlessly characterizing her in a way that she could not characterize herself means that her courage doesn't have the effect of elevating her soul, or showing her growth. What James the author would like to demonstrate about Isabel through an emotional effect upon the reader of pity and terror has been frittered away by the narrator's habits of storytelling. Examples abound on the other side, too, of the narrator finding just the right narrative method for portraying his, or in this case her, protagonist. Kate Chopin's The Awakening is also about a woman in an unsatisfying marriage. It is evident from the beginning of the novel that Edna Pontellier is in for a major change in her situation. Her husband is conventional and irritable, and she knows that she doesn't love him and never has. Chopin's prose, however, does not press upon the two of them. The narrator spends as much time depicting the world of southern Louisiana as she does depicting the changes in Edna—in fact, much of the reader's sense of the changes in Edna grows out of how sensuously Edna begins to see her world. As her world enlarges and becomes more vivid, her ability to confine herself to the bourgeois corner that her husband and children inhabit grows less and less. Chopin the narrator lets her prose flower in sync with the consciousness of Edna, and when Edna makes her choice at the end, the reader under-

WHAT IS A NOVEL?

stands, sympathizes with, and is moved by it. The test of a well-chosen and well-executed narrative voice is the climax of the novel. We can read Pride and Prejudice ten times and still feel conscious pleasure when Darcy and Elizabeth connect. Wanting to know what happens next turns out to have nothing to do with our anticipation, and the relationships developed among the author, the narrator, and the protagonist as demonstrated and developed by the prose turn out to have everything to do with it; as we grow to like Elizabeth and Darcy more and more through Austen's handling of them, we desire their reconciliation more and more. Paradoxically, given that novels are always referred to as "fiction," the fictive nature of the novel is its most contingent quality. "Fictiveness" arises in part out of length. As a narrative elaborates and prose extends itself, the connection of the protagonist and his story to literal truth becomes more and more tenuous. Lengthy prose is required to be interesting—otherwise the reader won't go on with it—but we can contrast lengthy prose based on fact, such as narrative history, which gains interest through the compilation of authenticated facts, with novels. The historian is required to give up dramatic interest in the pursuit of accuracy, but a novelist must give up accuracy in the pursuit of narrative drive and emotional impact. Even if the novel is based entirely on what the novelist himself has experienced, he will rework the experiences to make them more vivid and evocative, and, indeed, more logical and comprehensible. In reworking them, he will betray, or transcend, the original experience. Edith Wharton remarked that the job of the novelist is to thoroughly think through each element or aspect of his or her novel. The resulting feeling of completion is essentially fictional. An author may excavate her memory to come up with every aspect of the experience she wants to depict. If she switches for even a sentence or two out of her own point of view and memory into that of another character, she has yielded to the urge to write something more complete than what she knows for certain. And, as Proust would have maintained, the construction of memories themselves, and their arrangement into a logical and understandable order, may make them fictional, but also makes them worth reading about. In other words, lengthy written prose narratives with protagonists are all fictional, but fiction is what results from the other qualities, not what dictates them.

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COMPLEXITY

The fact that while the novel seems to be limitless and universally capacious, it is actually much more particular in many ways results from how its five characteristics combine. As an example, let's consider writing and length. Because a novel is a printed book, subject to laws of intellectual property and also subject to commerce, it goes into the world as the author composed it. It retains its purity and constitutes a direct communication from one person to another. A reader who doesn't like what an author has to say may close it, burn it, recommend against it, give it a bad review in a publication, or even censor it, but she doesn't thereby destroy it, as she would if she simply retold the story, leaving out the objectionable parts or adding a little bit of sentiment or clarification here and there. A novel is known to be a book. A redaction of a novel, by Hollywood or Broadway or Reader's Digest or a paraphrase or any other means, is known not to be a novel, not to be authentic. A novel can be dropped or outmoded or rediscovered by readers, but it can't be changed into something else, in the way that the stories that were the bases of epic poems or traditional folktales were changed in the telling. Controversies raised by a novel can become general; a book such as The Awakening or D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover can be greeted with outrage, or prominent thinkers can declare that a book such as de Sade's Justine should never be put into the hands of young girls. Novels as popular, irreducible, available books promote argument about the issues they explore, and indeed are often meant by their authors to do so. As books, censored or outlawed novels become precious. Restrictions enhance the reader's desire for a private experience—that of reading a banned book—and so promote the very subject they are about, the individual's sensation of coexistence with the group. As a book, a novel enhances its reader's sense of power. Don't like the author? Throw the book away. Think this obscure book is better than that famous one? State your opinion. Disagree with the very respected author? You may, because the book is in your hands, in your power, which makes you the author's equal. But the book itself you cannot destroy.

WHAT IS A NOVEL?

Imagine the roster of heroes and heroines that novels have carried around the world. David Copperfield stands beside Frankenstein and not far from Scarlett O'Hara and Count Dracula, Anna Karenina, Scrooge, Uncle Tom, Jo March, Becky Sharp, the Count of Monte Cristo, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Elizabeth Bennet, Captain Bligh and Captain Ahab. Some have received a boost from the movies, but others have not. The protagonist, made accessible by prose and interesting by narrative and familiar by length, and then dispersed by the written word, has entered the lives and minds of millions and recreated them, at least a bit, in his or her own image. The significance of this combination—writing and ordinary protagonist—has changed the way people relate to literature and, indeed, to themselves. A protagonist is usually interesting not because he is someone special (in fact, it is harder to write about someone special) but because something happens to him. Because the novel has to be long and organized, he has to become interesting as he deals with the thing that happens to him. This typical transformation from an ordinary person to someone worth remembering comes to seem both routine and appealing, encouraging readers to see themselves as potentially interesting and their lives as potential material for novels. Thus are the moral lives of readers encouraged to develop complexity; thus are new characters born out of old ones. When Jean Rhys, who grew up in the Caribbean, read Jane Eyre, her direct experience of a world that she felt Charlotte Brontë had not understood caused her to reimagine the monstrous Mrs. Rochester as an abused and abandoned child, used as a commodity by her relatives in their attempt to ally themselves to Rochester's fortune. Rhys's novel, in turn, heralded a reconsideration of many aspects of European colonial exploitation in the Caribbean, which has resulted in astonishing works by such disparate authors as Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, and Edwidge Danticat. Other combinations of the novel's five basic characteristics have important implications, too. A long prose narrative offers accessibility through the prose, and entertainment through the narrative. A common complaint about young English girls in the eighteenth century was that they chose to read novels when they should have been reading sermons. When the entertainment of narrative came in the door, it was thought, self-improvement flew out the window. Length adds complexity, enhances enjoyment, and at the same time promotes persuasion. Sometimes a reader disagrees with everything a novelist says but

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is seduced by some charm or other—intelligence, wit, suspense—to keep reading. By the end of a long novel, the author has had many hours to win the reader over, and the reader may find herself entertaining thoughts and ideas willingly that were once alien or even distasteful to her. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, Dorian pores over a novel given to him by Lord Henry, which does more than anything else to persuade him that he wants to live a life of sensual pleasure at any cost. Readers commonly feel, after reading a long novel about some time or place that they have no actual experience of, that they now "know" that time or place intimately—perhaps more intimately than they "know" their own surroundings. With length, details pile up, the imagination fills in, experience becomes more and more vivid. Prose, in combination with the relationship between the protagonist and his group, makes a realistic narrative more likely (though there are plenty of novels that are not realistic). Since prose is the style average people use to talk about money, family relationships, work, survival, getting from here to there, trivia, and also the style of jokes and memos, newspapers and letters, it makes writing about common things easier. Prose makes it more likely that the protagonist will be ordinary, more subject to the effects of money, work, survival, and trivia than to the effects of heroism or high destiny. Prose deflates the hero, as poetry and drama inflate him. As it adds up, prose moves on to the next event, and forces the characters and the reader to move on, too, giving novels life and hope, even when the story explicitly being told is dreary and hopeless. Prose implies that events can be organized, understood, endured, and survived. When the curtain falls on a great tragedy, that is the end of those characters and that situation, and often the audience is meant to feel shocked and bereft—worked up to a high pitch of feeling by the climax, and then dropped over the cliff of the denouement. That's what catharsis is all about. In novels, though, prose plus the protagonist plus the group tend to block catharsis, reminding the reader that whatever emotions we suffer, life goes on. But the most important essential characteristic of the novel that arises out of its structure, out of the combination of narrative and length, is that it is inherently political. It is possible to have a short story, a drama, a novella, or a movie that explores a single consciousness or a single experience. A hundred pages that emphasize a single mind is not at all unusual. But a novel—a story that runs a hundred pages or longer—must for the sake of context and variety include

WHAT IS A NOVEL?

other characters. In many ways, it is easy to see why this is. Focusing on the workings of a single mind gives rise to questions of why that mind works that way, or under what circumstances the mind works in that way, or how that mind is unique (thereby warranting such focus). The reader knows it is highly implausible that a single human mind has no social context, and the author knows this, too, so even as a mere filling in of the blanks, the author begins to depict the group that the protagonist is part of. Inevitably, the subject of any novel comes to be the coexistence of the protagonist and his group. As the group takes shape, so the protagonist takes shape. As the novel lengthens and the group becomes more detailed, so the protagonist's relationship with the group becomes more detailed; and as the details mount up, so does the requirement that the author have a theory of individuals and groups. The narrative, and therefore the logic, of the protagonist's relationship to the group must express some explicit or implicit theory, and inevitably many of these theories are political, because politics is about the division of power in human groups. Even authors who choose not to be political, such as Italo Svevo or Laurence Sterne, end up falling somewhere on the political spectrum, because the very assertion that all of life is personal is political. Virginia Woolf offers an interesting paradox. In her essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," Woolf maintains that the reality of life is personal—the experience of consciousness—and that such authors as Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, who pay explicit attention to social, cultural, and political arrangements, are missing the point. The point, as Woolf suggests in Orlando, is the thrilling experience of the present moment. Everything else is a sort of dry dust that falls away, insignificant and distracting. Many of Woolf 's most famous works move from character to character, moment to moment, attempting to capture and renew the sense of wonder that exists apart from and inside of social, cultural, and political arrangements. Woolf is, in this sense, apolitical. But in another sense, she is very political, because the logical outcome of her method is a radical democratizing of the novel. No consciousness is privileged. No class, no degree of virtue or talent, no amount of money, no uniqueness of perspective gets to own the depiction of consciousness. A child, such as James in To the Lighthouse; a troubled man, such as Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway; a not very appealing person, such as Bernard in The Waves, can have as important and revealing experiences as any heroine of Dickens, any hero of Trollope. The author's job, according to Woolf, is to preserve exceptional

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moments, not to award them to exceptional people. Woolf, it is well known, democratized the novel without herself being democratic— she was often snobbish and disdainful, and she liked to hang around people of her own class and intellectual attainments. But her own predilections are of absolutely no importance to her argument. As soon as her argument went into the world, it transformed the world's sense of what is and what is not important, at least as far as subjects of the novel are concerned. Woolf 's novels aren't overtly about power, but they show that power, especially the power of true observation, does not have any necessary connection to status or beauty. And not only is the novel inherently political, it is also inherently liberal—that is, it embraces the rights and obligations of individualism. This is easy to understand as soon as we realize that a lengthy prose narrative must be well organized to be readable. A novel's organization depends upon distinct and readily identifiable characters. They begin by having names and go on to have appearances, characteristics, and histories. Thus, purely for the sake of organization, the novel promotes the idea of individuals' having memorable idiosyncrasies and importance. As a result, it appeals to the reader's sense of her own distinctness and importance. And novel-reading cannot be a collective experience. Just as, without Hamlet to remind the audience that appearances are deceiving, the audience of a drama might believe in the legitimacy of Claudius' rule, so, too, without authorial reminders of the importance of "the people" or "the nation," novelreaders might forget the existence of the collective (as opposed to a group of distinct individuals) entirely. In a society that promotes conformity, novel-reading—one person experiencing both the mind of another person and her own mind experiencing—is a subversive force. Additionally, the liberal continuum that the novel runs upon is rather narrow. The protagonist has only a few choices in his necessary relationship to the group—he can be subsumed, he can make a comfortable connection, he can make an uncomfortable accommodation, he can refuse to accommodate and remain apart, or he can be destroyed by the group. The author's predilections, theories, and temperament will combine with the logic of the plot to dictate one of the five. But whatever happens to the protagonist, the individuals of the group constitute a countervailing balance—they are all more or less as individuated as he is, and so true conformity, of the sort required under communism or theocracy, is not possible in a novel. Additionally, the most individualistic outcomes are generally depicted

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tragically—if the individual remains or becomes isolated, his victory is at the very least a Pyrrhic one. It may vindicate his views of the corruption or emptiness or shallowness or brutality of society, but it does not demonstrate that isolation is a happy state. Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth is a good example. Lily Bart is a sympathetic and attractive young woman, but she has no means of support. She is best suited to earning her living by marrying someone wealthy whom she doesn't particularly like or respect, but she can't bring herself to do so, even at the cost of her life. In a very muted moral victory, she takes an overdose of a sleeping mixture and dies in a small, dirty room; the class she once belonged to goes on, undamaged and unaware of her fate. In Franz Kafka's The Trial, Josef K. is expelled, bit by bit, from the fairly comfortable and conforming life he had been leading. Finally, for no substantial reason, he is killed by the side of the road. His fate is "necessary" but not preferable. Wharton writes as a "realist" and Kafka writes as a "surrealist," but they share a view of what is true about the individual's relation to the group. The fate of Julien Sorel in The Red and the Blacfy the fate of Pechorin in A Hero of Our Time; the fate of Anna in Anna Karenina; the fates of a multitude of other protagonists are all similar—undone, whether deserving or undeserving, by society. But it is possible for some protagonists to be integrated into their group, though this happens mostly in English and American novels. Only the darkest Dickens novels disallow some kind of happy marriage at the end, and in my favorite, Our Mutual Friend, the two couples (Bella and John, Eugene and Lizzie) and their friends the Boffins and Mortimer Lightwood form a strong and happy circle within the larger, more corrupt London world. In Uncle Toms Cabin, Tom dies, but Cassy and Eliza and their families form a cohesive, happy, and activist group at the end. In Middlemarch, Dorothea marries Will Ladislaw, and Mary Garth marries Fred Vincy. In Ulysses, of course, Leopold Bloom comes home at night, welcomed into the arms of Molly. Nevertheless, no novel is ever about how everything turned out well for everyone through the achievement of Utopia, whether of faith or of politics. The protagonist must contrast to those around him to be the protagonist. This means that his fate sets him apart, happy or sad. The novel is inherently political, but the organizational demands of the novel form mean that it doesn't fit easily into political ideas of class or group blame or virtue. Every important character in a novel is portrayed as having moral complexity. If a character is solely evil, or is

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solely good, or solely a victim, then he or she is a figure or a symbol of something but not a protagonist, not possessed of agency, which in a novel is the only standard of real importance. A protagonist in a novel, of whatever ethnic background and in whatever time period, cannot be wholly good or wholly bad and still be interesting enough to read about. And novelists have no actors to give nuance to the characters they create—for example, bringing subtle depth or charisma to an Iago. Consequently, readers with an essentially political agenda, looking for models of proper thinking and behavior, are hardly ever going to find them in novels. The novel always promotes complexity as both an organizational principle and a narrative principle. My favorite example of a novel character who cannot be assimilated by any political group is Tom in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Tom never acts as a member of his class—a slave, he consistently offends by refusing to yield his conscience. Given the choice to run away when he is sold to a dealer, Tom chooses to go along rather than endanger the economic well-being of the plantation and thereby his family. Given the choice between death or the betrayal of another slave by Legree, Tom chooses death. Given the choice of killing Legree, by Cassy, Tom refuses to imperil his immortal soul by committing murder. In every circumstance, Tom makes his decisions according to his conscience and then hopes for the best, always bolstered by the conviction that this world is ephemeral and one's true reward is in heaven. In the context of the novel, Tom is virtuous, but his virtue is based on an understandable logic. Although he is often the object of others' designs, he sees himself as the agent of his own fate. Outside the context of the novel, his complexity has never been understood. In our day he is seen as craven and accommodating, hardly a man at all, while in Stowe's day his very assertion of agency flew in the face of accepted views of slave, and black, behavior. When we survey our hundred novels, and all of their hundreds of relatives and neighbors, it seems at first as if they are impossibly diverse, but the five essential qualities of the lengthy written prose narrative with a protagonist have actually limited their variety and the number of things they are capable of communicating, and this is as true of The Tale ofGenji (1004) as it is of Atonement (2001).

3 • Who

Is a Novelist?

I had not then read any real novels. I had heard it said that George Sand was a typical novelist. That had prepared me in advance to imagine that François le Champi contained something inexpressibly delicious. -MARCEL PROUST,

Swann's Way

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novel has an author. The desire to write a novel is the single / \ required prerequisite for writing a novel. It is the only thing / \that overcomes all the handicaps—perfectionism, low selfesteem, depression, alcoholism, diseases of all kinds, immense riches, economic hardship, deadly enemies, the resistance of relatives and friends, laziness, retarded professional development, the regular responsibilities of adulthood, even imprisonment (Sir Thomas Malory, for example, wrote the romance/protonovel Le Morte d'Arthur while imprisoned during the Wars of the Roses). While the desire to write a novel does not guarantee that the resulting novel will be a good one, or, if it is, that the author will produce a string of good ones, it is the only way to begin. Most often it grows out of a compulsive habit of reading as a child. It was said of Sinclair Lewis that he was always doing two things at once, and one of them was reading a book. Charles Dickens was an avid reader as a boy; his dearest childhood memories were of reading The Tales of the Arabian Nights. I read in preference to almost every other activity, though I didn't read anything respectable. I liked the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew. The Brontes, living in a solitary Yorkshire parsonage with a very eccentric father, not only read compulsively but also wrote compulsively, and had composed many hundreds of pages by their late teens. 29

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Undoubtedly, we were reading for all the wrong reasons—escape, pleasure, avoidance of responsibilities and human contact. We were reading because it was easy and fun and because we were unsupervised. We were reading to find companions more congenial than those around us. We wanted to fill our heads with nonsense and tune out practical considerations. We were not, most likely, athletic or useful sorts of children. We were reluctant to help around the house or to go outside and play. We did not have very good manners, because in numerous ways to be cited later, reading books is deleterious to good manners. We did not have good sleep habits, because if we had, we would not have read under the bedcovers with a flashlight, or held the book up to the moon that shone through the window, and ruined our eyes. We were reading because we had two lives, an inner life and an outer life, and they were equally important to us and equally vivid. A novelist is someone whose inner experience is as compelling as the details of his or her life, someone who may owe more to another author, never met, than to a close relative seen every day. A novelist has two lives—a reading and writing life, and a lived life. He or she cannnot be understood at all apart from this. I once asked a woman mathematician whether it was true that math talent went with the Y chromosome, a tendency to allergies, lack of social skills, and left-handedness. She told me that she didn't think so, but that the large population of left-handed male mathematicians with allergies felt most comfortable with their own sort because they had no social skills, so it was a self-selecting profession. Novelists are selfselecting in a similar way. Most children's books and fantasies are about introverted, highly imaginative heroes or heroines who overcome outsider status, either so they can join the group or so they can transcend the group; children who read a lot of books come to identify with those sorts of protagonists and come to be like those sorts of protagonists. Novels for children and young adults are soothing and reaffirm the young reader's sense of worthiness. The child, who may have few friends, gathers around himself or herself an array of characters who are entertaining and forgiving and enlightening. From our habit of reading, we unconsciously imbibed hundreds of character portrayals, thousands of word usages and sentence structures, thousands of metaphors, similes, and circumlocutions. We saw countless motives analyzed, innumerable behaviors described. We followed plot after plot from exposition to denouement. In assuaging our loneliness or our boredom we also learned what it took to make a

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novel, though most of us didn't try it at first. We were interested in content, but the intuitive knowledge of form entered along with the content and became part of our mental furniture. A good example of this process, for me, was my love of Sherlock Holmes stories, and, in particular, my frequent rereading of The Hound of the BasJ^ervilles when I was eleven and twelve. Although I was an avid reader, I was not a sophisticated one, and when I took up Holmes, I had only the dimmest idea of most of the things Watson talks about in the novel—I could hardly picture a moor or a mire, I had never seen a convict or been to London. I did not understand what an "avenue of yews" was or know why the Baskerville estate passed from one distant relative to another. I could not imagine the dastardly crime committed by the ancestor Hugo Baskerville that was the source of the family curse. No one I knew spoke with the formality or the diction of Holmes and Watson. I knew the two were friends. I knew Holmes solved mysteries. I had read Agatha Christie and Nancy Drew. I loved dogs. I imagined the hound itself as an extra-large Great Dane, like the one who lived on the property behind us, but black. I am sure that the first time I read The Hound of the Bas\ervilles, I had no idea what the solution to the mystery was, and I am sure that Conan Doyle was perfectly able to convince me that Holmes was the world's greatest deducer. I am sure that the identity and motive of the killer came as much of a surprise to me as it did to Watson, and to the readers of Conan Doyle's day who made the novel so popular. But I can't remember, because I read the novel many times, until the details of the mystery, and even certain phrases and effects, were completely, though unconsciously, memorized. I read it because of the air of dark fascination that hung over the setting and because of the exciting appearance of the hound itself, with his phosphorescent face and huge size (I was sure I could have made friends with that hound, no matter what they said about him, and I pitied the way they treated him). I reread it because Holmes was never not in control of the situation, and to him, all dangers were exciting and all mysteries were puzzles. I read it because it was reassuring (as Giants in the Earth, by Ole Rôlvaag, and The Bridge of San Luis Key, by Thornton Wilder, books I was required to read in school, were not); Conan Doyle's worldview was solid, and even innocent. The Hound of the Bast^ervilles was entirely appropriate reading for a twelve-year-old. What I learned from it was not what I read it for. Each time I reread

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the novel, knowing the tricks and the deceptions of the plot, I learned how the tricks and the deceptions worked together logically. The novel had two stories—the story as it unfolded on the surface, and the story of what had happened. The two stories had to mesh perfectly for Holmes's recapitulation to be convincing, but the surface story had to successfully hide the real story for the recapitulation to be interesting. Both stories had to bolster Holmes's claim to special intellectual status, as did everything he said, all of his mannerisms, and everything he did. Watson could make claims for Holmes, but Conan Doyle had to depict Holmes in a way that made good on the claims, at least in the eyes of a twelve-year-old. Rereading any novel over and over, for whatever reason, makes it fall into pieces. The veil that suspense and style throw over construction on the first reading or two lifts, and the author's plotting becomes more and more clear. I learned about the logical construction of plot and the clear construction of character. The Hound of the Basfyervilles was not the best novel I read at that time in my life, but it was the most clearly constructed. As I reread it today, it seems obvious and pedestrian, but I imbibed a good deal from it early in my literary career because it was complicated enough to interest me, but not so complicated as to be utterly seamless and impossible to dissect. And so, literature itself and novels themselves are one of a nascent novelist's primary inspirations—it may be that they are the primary inspiration in most cases, because most children and adolescents have no perspective on their lives, so they don't often have any idea that their lives are unusual or worth writing about. Unhappiness, isolation, even what others would call adventures are just the stuff of every day. Or we can look at it another way and say that literature, the great river of novels, enters into individuals and extends itself into the future through them, because there is no other way for it to do so. A novelist is someone who has volunteered to be a representative of literature and to move it forward a generation. That is all. The second great inspiration for a novelist is language. Some novelists have a distinctive genius for language, and all forms of language as spoken and written energize and inspire them. Dickens is a good example of a novelist who sought out and delighted in all forms of writing and talk—he walked the streets of London through many nights, talking to people he met and listening to others. He was a great lover of the theater, and not only respectable drama, but also all shows and spectacles. As an actor, he was a noted mimic. He loved jokes,

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songs, and rhymes of all sorts. He worked hard editing several magazines, and his letters to his authors show that he paid close attention to their style. He wrote and rewrote—often he would rewrite his books between serial publication and volume publication. He was a justly celebrated letter writer. He was, of course, a great prose stylist, with many voices and dictions at his command, as inventive with words as any English writer ever. Clearly his relationship to the English language went beyond love to something more intimate, something more living, something like breathing. Dickens introduced certain types of characters into the English novel—characters such as Sam Weller in The PicJ{wicf{ Papers, whose flow of speech is a flow of selfrepresentation and a flow of wisdom, too. But what came first, Sam or his way of talking? If we imagine Dickens in his early twenties, all ears, preternaturally alert to the myriad voices around him, then characterization becomes the fruit of language rather than vice versa. Dickens's books are peopled with embodied voices who talk first and submit to the plot later. Of course, there are other novelists who have distinctive styles, clearly styles that owe a great deal to the linguistic universes of their youth—William Faulkner, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol, Nancy Mitford, Garrison Keillor. All of these novelists have a claim on our attention because the way in which narratives are wedded to the telling of them is striking and profound. Others, many of them women (though I think Flaubert fits in here), such as Jane Austen, Alice Munro, George Eliot, Edith Wharton, and Elizabeth Bowen, are especially subtle and precise. They don't cause the language to do more, but they cause it to communicate more perfectly and efficiently. George Eliot, in her use of analogy and extended metaphor, as well as in her very nuanced deployment of conceptual words that would seem dry in the hands of another novelist, is especially good at depicting a whole range of ideas that other authors hardly seem to have thought about. Whereas Dickens's work is vividly picturesque, Eliot's is vividly smart. Middlemarch is an entire education in the sources and results of human feeling, and also in how capaciously and fully it is possible to think about things. Novelists are not the only artists, of course, who are inspired by language. Obviously all of the literary arts depend upon writers with verbal fluency. The novel has proved exceptionally difficult to analyze stylistically, though, because of the multiplicity of voices prose may include. Each time a character speaks, he is likely to speak in a way

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that differs from every other character and also from the narrator because distinctiveness is one of the main methods an author has to organize his characters so the reader can keep them straight. The writer with a tin ear is at an organizational disadvantage compared with a writer with a good ear. To dare to write about many different characters, and to keep them straight without the help of actors, is in some ways a bold endeavor. It imposes several duties upon the author. I have mentioned order, in the sense that the readers don't want to get the characters mixed up, but there is also the progress of the plot. Characters in dialogue are required to more or less move the story along. If they are just sitting around chatting meaninglessly, then the novel comes to be about the meaninglessness the characters are demonstrating. Meaninglessness can be demonstrated only so many times before the reader decides to close the book. The voices of characters are also required to seem authentic. The captain of a whaling ship must talk as a captain of a whaling ship would talk—with characteristic vocal mannerisms and with typical knowledge. Depending upon his role in the novel, though, a character is also required to have something interesting to say that simultaneously deepens the reader's knowledge of him, deepens the reader's knowledge of the other characters, deepens the reader's understanding of the story, and best of all, deepens the reader's knowledge in general. Novelists who don't love language enough to discern these things in the talk and the writing around them have a much more difficult time becoming novelists than novelists who do. Fortunately, an affinity for language is common. Possibly it runs in families—my relatives were always telling stories, making jokes, coming up with expressions and sayings. They were talkative, and they took pleasure in talk the way musical families take pleasure in music. Talkative families give children a rich linguistic environment in which to develop their own linguistic abilities. But it seems also true that a child's native language can be better or worse at producing novelists, that the richness and variety of the language (the "langue" as opposed to the "parole") asks to flower into lengthy prose. The question of why the novel, when it took hold, took hold first in England, is always an interesting one, similar to the question of why the Icelandic sagas were written in Iceland rather than Norway. Was it only printing and leisure time and the rise of the literate middle class? Are the necessary origins of the novel as an established art form only material ones hav-

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ing to do with commerce and readership? Or is English itself especially well suited to lengthy prose? I think it is enlightening to look at Daniel Defoe in this context. Defoe was more or less a hack writer who wrote polemics, speeches, manuals, business guides, ghost stories, and advice books, but money doesn't always drive out art. More often they coexist, with art having the last say. Defoe was a London man; he lived by trade at the heart of a world that was just discovering the power of trade, of shipping, of international exploration and exploitation. He knew and wrote about the ways of the worlds—the world of the poor as well as the world of the rich, the world of the up-and-coming as well as the world of the declining and disappearing, the world of the traveler as well as the world of the captured, trapped, isolated, and abandoned. Defoe also grew up reading and listening to the King James Bible, because he came from a strongly religious Protestant household. Anthony Burgess remarks in his introduction to the 1966 Penguin edition of A Journal of the Plague Year that "Defoe was equipped by training, as well as by temperament, to turn into the first really modern writer, his mind disposed to independence, liberalism, scientific inquiry, master of five languages (though Latin and Greek not among them), his interests immediate and practical, not classical and remote" (p. 8). When Defoe turned to writing novels, it was a small step from the books he was already writing (including a travel journal called A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain) to the fiction he is remembered for. He published seven novels in five years. In doing so, he incorporated the stories and the languages of seven vigorous English types into the new middle-class form of literature, the novel, a literature about working, getting by, making the best of the free-market economy as it was constituted in the early eighteenth century (no social safety net, as Defoe repeatedly pointed out). The choice between virtue and gain, or between virtue and survival, was Defoe's constant subject. His characters are always weighing the inner life against the outer life, and Defoe's language has a great deal of psychological sophistication rendered in practical, commonsense terms. Most readers first read Robinson Crusoe as children, but it is worth going back and reading it as an adult, after reading many other novels. What is immediately striking is that although Crusoe's adventures are still of some interest, it is mental and spiritual growth that are really the heart of the story, and to depict it requires a supple style. A good example of how all of

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this works together occurs about 70 percent of the way into the novel, at a point where Crusoe is getting to know Friday. Crusoe begins one paragraph, "From hence, I sometimes was led too far to invade the Soverainty of Providence, and as it were arraign the Justice of so arbitrary a disposition of things, that should hide that Light from some, and reveal it to others. . . ." The next paragraph begins, "But to return to my New Companion; I was greatly delighted with him, and made it my Business to teach him every Thing, that was proper to make him useful, handy, and helpful; but especially to make him speak. . . ." This paragraph is followed by one that begins, "After I had been two or three Days return'd to my Castle, I thought that in order to bring Friday off from his horrid way of feeding, and from the Relish of a Cannibal's Stomach, I ought to let him taste other Flesh; so I took him out with me one Morning to the Woods . . ." (pp. 193—94, Modern Library edition). In about one page of active and lively prose, Defoe takes up his spiritual doubts and what he does with them, the nature of his growing attachment to Friday and his sense of what sort of person Friday seems to be, and how his obligations to Friday's welfare lead him to act, and lead Friday to react. (In the third paragraph, Crusoe shoots a goat. Friday, unfamiliar with firearms, is astonished at the noise and amazed at what happens to the goat.) Defoe's narrative moves quickly and smoothly from what happens to how the characters feel about it, to how Crusoe gives it meaning (or speculates about it—part of the suspense of the novel is that Crusoe is attempting to work out what things mean over the course of his long stay on the island), and, finally, to new things that Crusoe learns as he explores his home. Defoe is as comfortable with words such as "arraign" as he is with words such as "handy." That he calls his hut a "Castle," refers to Friday as "feeding" and to the "Relish of a Cannibal's Stomach" shows he is fully sensitive to the ironic power of English words to communicate several connotations at the same time, that this is a natural part of his style rather than an effect he is striving for at an especially important juncture of the narrative. Most important, for his purposes, Defoe is entirely comfortable moving between the language of action and survival, which is largely made up of words with AngloSaxon roots, such as "Flesh," and the language of religious discourse, which is largely made up of Latinate words, such as "Foundation." Defoe was inspired by the adventures of Alexander Selkirk, the original castaway, but his own inner life told him what to do with Robinson Crusoe.

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Defoe was conversant with a wealth of English dialects, spoken and written, urban and rural. In addition to being narrated in the first person, his books are full of dialogue; they also quote advertisements and bills and documents. For our purposes, they sample the English language of the early eighteenth century in a prolific and unexcelled manner. And most important, his books were widely read. Thanks to Defoe, by the time of Fielding, Dr. Johnson, and Samuel Richardson, an example had been set of variety and inclusiveness in English narrative prose. At the other end of the history of the English novel is White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. Smith, too, lives at the Defoean/Dickensian nexus of London as a vortex of disparate stories and languages, and she, too, is clearly inspired by English as a robust and colorful river of words and grammar that has an energy of its own that brings characters, incidents, ideas, social classes, and imaginative worlds together whether they will or no, but the tributaries of her river are no longer only the Thames and the Ware, and they no longer empty into the North Sea, as Defoe's did. Her river begins in the Himalayas and the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, in the Snowy Mountains in Australia and the Highlands of Scotland, all the places that English has flowed into and returned from, altered and enriched. Her London is, like Defoe's, not quiet or traditional, but full of overt and covert conflict, and a little dangerous. A major source of discomfort for some of Smith's characters is the difficulty of fixing on an authentic language that communicates the inner life as well as it does the communal life. English itself, though, Smith can't help demonstrating, exalts the variousness of the characters even while it sometimes hinders their attempts to know themselves. The inspirational effects of language, of course, lead to the inspirational effects of life, and we normally think of a novelist as someone who has something to say—a view of the world or a story to tell that is mostly autobiographical. Traditionally, great novelists live dramatic lives. Snorri Sturluson, the author of Egilssaga, was assassinated. Charlotte Brontë, the author of Jane Eyre and Villette, died during pregnancy, after watching her two novelist sisters and her brother die of tuberculosis. Herman Melville spent years in the South Pacific. Giovanni Boccaccio was a famous man of letters who also performed diplomatic work for various princes. Marguerite de Navarre was a queen and the sister of a king. Ernest Hemingway shot himself.

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F Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis were famously and, depending on your view of drunks, tragically or heroically or obnoxiously dissipated. George Eliot lived out of wedlock with a man who was married to another woman. Edith Wharton was immensely rich and socially prominent. Aphra Behn was a successful dramatist in Restoration London, and traveled to South America as a young woman. James Joyce was blind. George Sand was a member of the French aristocracy who claimed both Chopin and de Musset as lovers. William Makepeace Thackeray's wife was schizophrenic and lived in a madhouse. Lady Murasaki was a woman-in-waiting to the empress of Japan. After many bouts of mental illness, Virginia Woolf killed herself. Vladimir Nabokov's father was assassinated by political rivals, and Nabokov went into exile. Biographies of novelists invariably assert that some part of the novelist's background or childhood led to the writing of novels and even engendered particular novels. But the three sources of inspiration for a novelist coexist in different ways in different novelists. In my opinion, the desire to write a novel and the affinity for language do more to determine the choice of the novel as mode of expression than the drama of particular life events. While on the one side we have Virginia Woolf, Herman Melville, and Cervantes, whose lives were full of drama before they became novelists, on the other side we have John Updike, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Flaubert, whose lives were not so different from the lives of most other men and women of their day. Their lives show that what happens to any novelist may only be a corollary to the books he writes, not at all a determining cause. Nonetheless, some novelists are motivated first and foremost by the desire to make something of their lives and experiences, even if the form of the novel doesn't come naturally to them or is unfamiliar to them. Cervantes, for example, who did not begin writing Don Quixote until he was almost fifty, had served as a soldier for most of his life, and had been maimed in the hand in battle. For Cervantes, it was not really possible that the form of the novel should inspire him, since there were not really any novels to do so. He is the paradigm of the aspiring novelist who for whatever reason is deprived of a model and a mentor, and has to make it up himself. Cervantes's strangely modern career as a novelist is evident in the differences between the two volumes of his novel, which were published some ten years apart. In volume i, Quixote, inversely mirroring the career of his creator, perhaps, has his head turned by reading too many romances of chivalry, and at an

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advanced age, leaves his impoverished estate and his sedentary pursuits to go out into the world to protect the virtuous and preserve the unfortunate. The idea is a clever and productive one, and affords Cervantes any number of episodes and jokes and comic depictions of the real world of late-sixteenth-century Spain as it contrasts with Don Quixote's romantic ideas. But some of Cervantes's material is recycled from other books, and in places he doesn't quite know what to do with his protagonist. The first volume of Don Quixote is lively but episodic and disorganized. At the end of it the author, still new to his form, doesn't seem to quite understand what it adds up to. By the beginning of the second volume, Cervantes had had quite a few more years to contemplate his protagonist, Sancho Panza, and, more important, I think, his life as an author. The second volume is more sophisticated than the first, and is, in fact, a nascent metafiction, which means it is self-referential, that it takes the nature of novelwriting as a subject, and that it integrates all of its levels of illusion smoothly. What Cervantes had not been able to come up with for his first novel—a convincing ending—he comes up with in the second novel, which also has far more emotional weight than the first. The two volumes together constitute the invention of the novel-of-a-manat-odds-with-his-world—and it is hard to overestimate the influence of Don Quixote on the subsequent history of the novel. For our purposes, though, it also shows that an adult may think and feel his way into writing a novel without really knowing what he or she is doing. The novel is a simple, capacious, natural, and accessible form. If the writer is willing to write, if he has a clever idea, if he is dedicated and patient, if he is willing to work out each incident and idea, he might indeed come up with a worthy and unique work of art. It is not unusual for even ambitious novelists to publish their first books in their thirties or their forties, and most novelists peak in middle age. Those who write their best work earlier have often, like the Brontë sisters, been writing feverishly since childhood or have written extensively in other forms before turning to the novel. The novel integrates several forms of human intelligence—verbal intelligence (for the style), psychological intelligence (for the characters), logical intelligence (for the plot), spatial intelligence (for the symbolic and metaphorical content as well as the setting), and even musical intelligence (for pacing and rhythm). Not only does it take a while to develop and integrate all five forms of intelligence, but also some intelligences develop more slowly than others. Logical intelligence as it applies to

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numbers seems to develop rather early, but as it applies to sequences of events (plots) whose connections may not be obvious, it seems to develop later. Spatial intelligence as it applies to visualizing shapes develops in infancy, but as it applies to understanding the links between or among disparate categories (metaphors), it develops as a result of broader experience. And because novel-writing integrates several forms of intelligence and because the novel requires lots of incidents richly worked out to sustain its length, novelists benefit from lots of experience—either many experiences or a few experiences experienced in great detail—but once someone has these, there is no reason why he or she cannot learn to write a novel. Thousands have. Writing novels is one of the few arts where native talent is a contingent rather than a necessary requirement. I return to my first point—the only thing an aspiring novelist needs to write a novel is the adamant and unkillable desire to write a novel. Such a desire gets a novel written no matter how mundane or dramatic the novelist's life has been, no matter how fluent or not fluent his various component intelligences are. And then, of course, the novel-writing itself affects the novelist, because novel-writing is a transformative act. Let's say a novel is a hypothesis, a dream, a therapeutic act, an ontological construct, and an assertion of self The first person to experience the effects of each of these is the novelist himself. The easiest to understand, at least in our day, is the novel as therapeutic act. When Dickens was writing Dombey and Son, he used the character of Mrs. Pipchin, who owns the infant school where little Paul Dombey is first sent, to depict Mrs. Roylance, who had been the landlady of the boardinghouse where the twelve-year-old Charles lived when he worked at the blacking factory in the Strand while his father and the rest of the family sat in debtors' prison. In earlier works, Dickens had been leery of delving into autobiographical material. His factory period was a terrible crisis in his young life, and he had been much afraid of everyone associated with it—his fellow boys at the factory, the people in the streets, and Mrs. Roylance herself. But the success of Mrs. Pipchin as a character and the success of the novel itself, both critically and commercially, persuaded Dickens to write about his childhood, which he first did in an autobiographical fragment and then in David Copperfield. All through the writing of David Copperfield, he loved David and the other characters and identified strongly with them. He was especially sorry to see them go when the novel was completed. More important, he was convinced

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at the end of David's story that his own story could and should turn out differently than it had in real life. He wrote to his friend John Forster that he longed for the companionship of a woman such as David's Agnes rather than that of his own wife, Catherine. Shortly after the publication of David Copperfield, he began to entertain ideas of linking up with other women—first his earliest love, who happened to send him a letter, but turned out, upon meeting, to be a disappointment, and later Ellen Ternan, whom he met in a dramatic performance of a play he had written with Wilkie Collins, and who became his friend and mistress for thirteen years. In the absence of trained professional help, Dickens became his own psychoanalyst, exploring his childhood and youth, diagnosing his circumstances and needs (if not his syndromes and character defects), and acting upon his diagnosis. He did not end up preserving himself from all future conflict and unhappiness, but through writing his novel, he did observe himself and then act upon his observations, which is the paradigm of the therapeutic act. In both novel-writing and psychotherapy, someone constructs a narrative. The author of the narrative uses various devices to achieve distance from the emotions of the situation, to bring it to a climax, and to resolve it. He gives the situation to a character not quite like himself, or he adopts a narrative voice that maintains a cooler, more analytical view of the situation than his own, or he makes a painful situation comic. The author of the narrative hopes to learn something from the exercise. It may be that the patient in therapy gains more insight into his condition because the understanding he comes to is guided by a trained psychotherapist. But it may also be that the novelist has the advantage, because the requirement of the novel that the situation be resolved so the book can end (and make some money) prompts the author to imagine various possible outcomes for the situation, some of which may be different from the historical outcome. The fact that Franz Kafka could not stop laughing when he read "The Metamorphosis" to his friend Max Brod attests to the distance he was able to achieve from his pervasive sense of obligation toward his family and his father—the story provides a solution; for the time being it's hilarious, even if it doesn't resolve the issue in Kafka's life. Novel-writing may not work as therapy, may sink the novelist into a mire of feelings that he or she cannot resolve (it takes as much wisdom to solve a significant problem in a novel as in life), or it may persuade the novelist that some risky course of action is the proper thing to do (divorce, for example), but the attempt to gain perspective is an attempt to not only

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come to terms with pain, but also to communicate those terms to others and to make something out of nothing. This is not to suggest that novel-writing makes people happy. The evidence from the biographies of novelists doesn't support such an assumption (though perhaps they were less unhappy than they would have been if they had not written novels). I think that a good rule of thumb is that novel-writing will make happy a person who can tolerate and enjoy an ever-intensifying experience of himself or herself. Novel-writing forces the novelist to turn inward day after day, year after year. No consolations, in the form of praise, fame, money, or importance can compensate for that effort if it is painful. All feelings of unworthiness will be felt over and over again; all self-doubts, all failures of love and self-respect, every sense of inadequacy will be reexperienced. Novelists who produce book after book find a way to deal with these feelings. In the Fitzgerald/Hemingway/Sinclair Lewis generation, novelists drank heavily, for example. Dickens loved his own work; he always thought the book he was working on, and therefore the person he was being at the time, was the best ever. Tolstoy expressed the same sort of self-confidence. Jane Austen's first audience was her loving and appreciative family. Some novelists denigrate the significance or the artistic effort of their work, telling themselves and others that it is just a way of earning a living—Trollope was such a one. Other novelists develop distancing habits of joking about themselves or the painful aspects of their careers, as Henry James did, or Ford Madox Ford. Novelists who are less prolific may simply not have the self-love, or the strength, or the professional motivation to face inward year after year. Even so, it is the willingness to do so at least sometimes that produces good work.* A novel is a hypothesis. A novelist shares with a scientist the wish to observe. A novelist also shares with a scientist a partial and imperfect knowledge of the phenomenon he wishes to observe. And so both novelist and scientist say "what if?" What if milk that was teeming with bacteria were to be heated to a certain predetermined temperature and allowed to cool? What if some uneducated country people were to set out on a journey by wagon to take the corpse of their mother back to her place of origin? The scientist then does his experiment, which he

*Perhaps it is possible to draw a distinction between novelists and poets. Poets also look inward year after year. But novelists, in the company of their characters, are never quite alone, which might preserve many of them from the suicidal impulses that often overtake poets.

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may refine over and over until his findings are clear and unequivocal. The novelist begins his novel. The test of his experiment is not whether its results can be reproduced, but either plausibility or accountability. His own mind is the first judge. Do Anse Bundren and his children, the characters in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, fit into a plausible pattern of human behavior? For this test, the novelist is required to have observed enough people to know what is plausible; in many cases he enlists the aid of friends or editors to help him make this judgment. But the plot point or character action may fail the test of plausibility. In this event, can the author account for it in an interesting or believable enough way to persuade the reader to accept it? For this, the novelist often uses his own experience to supply an unusual but right-seeming or appealing explanation. As the funeral journey of the Bundren family proves implausible, for example, and the author subjects them to a catalog of terrors, each member reacts in an arresting and memorable fashion—not plausible, but logical and idiosyncratic—and the reader is induced to accept their journey as a form of truth, even though it is new to her. There is always tension in a novel between the hypothesis behind it and how it unfolds. The common authorial experience of seeing characters act in unexpected but logical ways, of having them "come alive," is actually a recognition that the original hypothesis was wrong in some ways and requires modification. In the end, the experiment succeeds only if the author is able to bring it to a logical and fitting conclusion. If he can—as Faulkner does when Anse gets new teeth and introduces his new wife to the children—then he has successfully proposed a hypothesis that exists in addition to everyday life and also comments upon it. Ultimately, the novel has to do what the scientific experiment does—it has to withstand the observation and disagreements of other people. The novelist's hypothesis and the novel that grow out of it have to coincide with the worldview of editors, reviewers, book salesmen, and readers sufficiently for them to accept, at least provisionally, the author's hypothesis. If they do, then the novel, like the scientific experiment, adds to the store of human knowledge. If a novel is a hypothesis, then a novelist is a person with a theory. In fact, a novelist can't begin to fill four hundred pages of prose about how a protagonist coexists with his group if he doesn't have a theory. Every novel must embody a theory of how life works or it could not have a beginning, middle, and, especially, an end. Characters act only plausibly and events only seem to occur in a believable sequence (or at

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least a logical sequence) if the novelist has made theoretical order out of observed chaos. Whether the novelist's theory is objectively true, or original, or profound, or rational doesn't matter to the novelist. It only matters that he experiences himself as working out and exploiting his theory. Novelists are often portrayed by their natural enemies, biographers, as thoroughly in the grip of unconscious impulses or addictions or social pressures, or other forces that produce the novels, or produce what the novels really are (as opposed to what the novelists themselves thought they were). Novelists may, like other citizens, be subject to forces beyond their control, but in the writing of the novel, these forces do not matter. The novelist experiences himself as much as the agent of his own work as the scientist manipulating his beakers and test tubes or his DNA markers. A novelist's theory, like any other, has a large component of intuition, but he is active and intellectual in making sense of his theory, applying it, and working it out through his plot and characters. If he weren't, then the reader would never get the sense of a palpable intelligence working through the novel, meeting her own, delighting and challenging her own. The habit of propounding a theory or a series of theories has an effect on the novelist, of course—it may enhance his sense of authority (Henry James called himself "the Master," and Dickens called himself "the Inimitable"), lure him into boorish habits of gratuitous holding forth, or tempt him to manipulate the people around him in accordance with his theories. Even before a novelist becomes respected or wealthy, he fancies himself as a person with an ironclad theory and a solid set of beliefs. The theory itself is the source of his feeling of knowledge and power. Public recognition may ratify the theory (of course, for some novelists, public acceptance is the cardinal sign that a strongly held theory is probably wrong), but public rejection doesn't necessarily abrogate it. The novelist can always decide that the public just isn't ready for his theory. But, of course, the novel is a particular type of hypothesis—it is an ontological construct, it is a theory of being. A novel proposes that the world has a certain mode of existing. It doesn't propose this by asserting it explicitly, but by depicting it implicitly. A novelist may assert that the world is different than it appears to be; in fact, a novelist must do so as a result of the operation of point of view, but he or she cannot assert that the world does not exist because words have concrete referents, and to use them is to insert their concreteness into the reader's

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mind, a type of elephant-in-the-living-room phenomenon. In its very expression, the novel asserts that the world has being. But at the same time, the peculiarities of the novelist's presentation continuously assert that the world's being is artificially constructed. This is obvious with great and original stylists. It is more subtly apparent with stylists such as the Canadian writer Alice Munro, whose diction is refined and almost flat, but marked, in every turn of phrase and chosen detail, by insight and intelligence. Munro's mind does not appear to be stranger than the reader's mind, as Kafka's does, but it does seem to be wiser, and this feature serves to distinguish her from other writers with similar objective styles. The novelist's ontology is his most effective form of rhetoric. A novel persuades, as any argument does, but it uses assertion, sensation, and emotion as the prime elements of the argument. The first third of the novelist's argument is "This exists—Gregor was turned into a bug." The second is "This is what it feels like—he could see his little legs waving in front of his face." The third part is "This is what the feelings mean—was he an animal that he was so affected by the sound of his sister's violin playing?" The novelist's main rhetorical device is to evoke emotion in the reader through scenes and figurative language. Some novelists stop with this—shared experience of some charged event is all they want to achieve. Others have a stronger theory—they want the reader to feel the feelings and then accept the novelist's interpretation of them. The great nineteenth-century novelists all more or less fall into this camp. Harriet Beecher Stowe is a perfect example of the extremely ideological novelist. Her emotional insights all refer to themes of sin and redemption as depicted through the example of slavery in America. However skillfully she deploys her tools, she is open and even obvious about the conclusions she wants the reader to draw, and many modern readers who don't share her beliefs find her art suspect. But Leo Tolstoy is no less ideological in his intentions; he is simply more subtle. He does not want the reader to act in a certain way, but he does want the reader to believe in a certain way—he wants to change the reader's inner life so that it agrees with Tolstoy's views. He cared very much that his Russian readership should come to see Russian problems as he did. Only then, he felt, would they adopt useful solutions, homegrown Russian solutions that would differ from and be more suitable than imported European solutions. The necessity of an ontological theory arises not only out of a novel's length, but also out of its abstract nature. Since it has no being except as

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a reader's mental experience, it must assume that the world exists in order to itself exist. Words assert that the world exists because they have referents, but they can for a certain period of time exist and have power as mere sounds such as incantations, music, or rhythmic beats. Eventually, though, the experiencer of words wants them to mean something. A hundred and fifty thousand words always assert the objective existence of some sort of world, if only an imaginary one. Novelists are not professional philosophers or scientists. They are amateurs and avid novel readers, so they are perhaps more likely than professionals subject to peer review to develop a whole theory of being. If we look at our roster of novelists, we have to be struck by two facts: one is that most of them started out as nobodies, and the other is that many of them have come to be regarded as prophets and sages. Their job is to develop a theory of how it feels to be alive. Some novelists are more profoundly skillful at this than others. The source of Kafka's appeal, for example, is that certain experiences that others sense vaguely or portray in passing, such as the experience of feeling a compulsion to constantly work at one's given task ("The Burrow"), or the experience of being mysteriously singled out and persecuted by the impersonal state (The Trial), or the experience of sudden, unwelcome transformation ("The Metamorphosis"), Kafka depicts purely and intensely, without adding interpretation or context. The being of his protagonists is felt entirely through these imposed necessities, and thereby intensified. The reader is never invited to read larger meanings into these intensely felt states, but it is almost impossible not to. Simply by choice of subject and clarity of exposition, Kafka is able to suggest more about the nature of being than almost any other writer. The preeminence of the novel as a literary form suggests that the average reader enjoys having the nature of being, especially the nature of being ordinarily human, mirrored back to her. A novelist is the compleat generalist—he depicts as much as he can of what is around him. If he were more of a specialist, he wouldn't be a novelist, he would have a field of study (if he were more a specialist of words, he would be a poet). If he were more a generalist, he wouldn't be a novelist, he would be a roving bore, spouting theories to anyone who couldn't get away fast enough. A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing. As a novelist writes more and more novels, he refines his characteristic style. A novelist's style is his or her identity, his or her literary self. Like

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all identities, it is simultaneously developed and revealed, simultaneously conscious and unconscious, simultaneously the result of choice and the result of predisposition, simultaneously a product of education and utterly idiosyncratic. Style is the great conundrum of literature because it is too particular and vast to be analyzed except in a very rudimentary way, and yet it can be instantly apprehended and appreciated. One of the pleasures of reading a novel is the sense that we are experiencing another person's very nature. Literary style is not oral—it is not like being told a story; it is far more mental—it is like being inside the author's mind. And as a great author matures toward his or her perfectly representative work, his or her style comes to express his or her particular quality of mind more and more eloquently. Let's say for Jane Austen, it might be Persuasion: There was one point which Anne, on returning to her family, would have been more thankful to ascertain even than Mr. Elliot's being in love with Elizabeth, which was, her father's not being in love with Mrs. Clay; and she was very far from easy about it, when she had been at home a few hours, [ch. 16] For E. M. Forster, it might be A Passage to India: It so happened that Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested had felt nothing acutely for a fortnight. Ever since Professor Godbole had sung his queer little song, they had lived more or less inside cocoons, and the difference between them was that the elder lady accepted her own apathy, while the younger resented hers, [ch. 14] For Nancy Mitford, it might be Don't Tell Alfred: After this, incidents succeeded each other. A well-known pederast fainted dead away on seeing M'sieur Clement, and was heaved, like Antony to the Monument, into the entresol, [ch. 5] For Ford Madox Ford, it might be The Good Soldier: The result you have heard. He was completely cured of philandering amongst the lower classes. And that seemed a real blessing to Leonora. It did not revolt her so much to be connected—it is a

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sort of connection—with people like Mrs. Maidan, instead of with a little kitchenmaid. [ch. 5] Even in a sentence or two, the reader apprehends not only what the author is thinking of, but also how he or she thinks—with hesitations and qualifications, sharply and straightforwardly, conversationally, contemplatively. Each author's diction is characteristic, and so is his or her sense of rhythm and directness. His or her mental life, at least with regard to that particular subject, is more and more perfectly expressed by the style he or she uses. He is artful; he chooses; he manipulates; he decides; he judges every word and sound pattern and character detail and twist in the action, and yet every one of these things is automatic, given, natural, right. The mind writing is no longer made of parts— the conscious and the subconscious, the voluntary and the involuntary; it is rather one integrated whole, focused and choosing, from all the words in the language, the single perfect one. And the closer the author comes to his (or her) true stylistic self, the more distinct he becomes from every other writer who has ever written and the more precious he becomes to the reader. The glory of narrative prose is this very thing, freedom of authorial expression, unmediated by actors or poetical conventions or cameras. For me, the only things at all similar are self-portraits by artists such as Rembrandt, for whom selfconsciousness seems to disappear into the fascination of technical mastery. The novelist telling his story, making his artistic choices, is a continual presence to the reader, and this wonderful sense of presence is the effect of his style. As every novelist has a style, so every novelist has conviction, which is a type of emotion, not an act of reason. It may take draft after draft to achieve a perfectly natural style. It also may take draft after draft to write with sufficient conviction. This conviction can be about anything—a specific theory of human nature, a particular analysis of a single incident, a simple certainty that the writer knows what is true and has to tell it. Some novelists testify to their convictions—Virginia Woolf, for example, felt that the way humans experience life had been overlooked or betrayed by such novelists as Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy; her manifesto is "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown." Zora Neale Hurston felt that certain overlooked communities and their inhabitants ought to be portrayed from the inside, in their own language. Mikhail Lermontov wrote only one novel, A Hero of Our Time,

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but he was driven by the desire to represent a certain type of romantic (you might say pre-Nietzschean sort of sexual, brutal, despairingly individualistic) protagonist; he defended his portrayal in an afterword to the second edition of the novel. Numerous American novelists of the twentieth century expressed convictions about the hollowness and shallowness of American life. The most basic conviction of every novelist from Lady Murasaki on, though, is that things are not as they appear; this conviction can be added to or modified in accordance with the novelist's particular perceptions. Of course, poets and dramatists frequently express the same conviction, but novelists must express it, because narrative point of view inherently delineates the contrast between what one person thinks and what others around him think. Literary artists who are driven by the feeling that appearances are deceiving and that they know what the truth really is are drawn to the novel for this very reason. (By contrast, if we consider the play Hamlet, Hamlet frequently asserts that things are not as they seem in Denmark. He is referring to the crimes of Claudius and their subsequent cover-up. His premise is elaborated symbolically through the poetry as well, but one of the reasons he has to assert his opinion so often is that the appearance of the play has a countervailing reality for the audience. If Hamlet were silenced, and Claudius and his court were presented in some other plot, the audience would suspend disbelief in the actions on the stage as willingly as it does for Macbeth or The Merchant of Venice. Drama relies on the idea that events and characters are as they appear; otherwise they would carry no emotional power.) Eighteenth-century English novelists frequently wrote about a plucky or bold or lucky protagonist successfully making his way against a tide of privilege, criminality, and circumstances. At the least, such novels required the conviction that these outcast individuals were worthy of attention; they also required the conviction that their eventual triumph was possible and plausible. The Princess of Clèves, by Madame de La Fayette, illustrates the conviction that women have complex inner lives worthy of analysis. The Tale ofGenji, by Murasaki Shikibu, is imbued with the Buddhist ideas current in tenth- and eleventh-century Japan, and expressly imparts them as motives for the characters and as ways of analyzing the meaning of their lives. Sir Walter Scott's The Tale of Old Mortality delineates the ways different forms of religious belief create different personality structures, and how these, in turn, shaped Scottish history. Yukio Mishima's novel The

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Sailor Who Fellfrom Grace with the Sea is motivated by a different set of convictions about the nature of childhood than is Little Women. Egotistical or self-aggrandizing convictions fuel the novel-writing enterprise as readily as more altruistic ones do. All convictions go back to the novelist's early sense that his inner life is as real and interesting as his circumstances, that his view of things is as valid as the opinions of those around him. His first feeling of conviction might only be that he has to combat external pressure to conform. Writing powerfully embodies and develops the will to survive. The Czech novelist Arnost Lustig was eighteen and had lived in three concentration camps when he escaped from a train heading to Dachau and joined the Czech resistance. His many novels about the Holocaust assert not only his characters' will to survive, but also his own. The ways in which Rebecca West's economically and socially insecure Edwardian childhood molded her ambition and will are vividly evoked in her wonderful novel The Fountain Overflows. But convictions change. The paradox of a career of novels is that theories are found wanting, specific convictions dissipate, the novelist comes to see things in a different way. Tolstoy's convictions about marriage when he was writing Anna Karenina were different from those he held when he was writing The Kreutzer Sonata. A novelist can write a string of novels only if he or she is ready to embrace new ideas with as much conviction as he or she embraced earlier ideas. If the conviction simply dissipates or grows stale, the novels do, too. Some novelists have only one real conviction, which they express effectively a few times before the quality of their work declines. Perhaps F. Scott Fitzgerald would be an example of this. In general, the broader a novelist's interests and sympathies, the longer he can pursue his vocation. Great novelists have plenty of convictions. Later novels may contradict earlier ones—when Boccaccio wrote The Decameron he dedicated it to the pleasure of women; late in life he wrote another work that was virulently misogynistic. The theories that change motivate the novelist's ability to do the work because the novelist seizes new theories and ideas with the same enthusiasm every time. He may be consistent only in the passion with which he takes up new theories and applies them. Fortunately, the essential conviction that things are not as they appear is one that almost any novelist can harbor for his or her entire life without fear of contradiction. And every novelist operates with one other essential conviction: almost from the first moment a future novelist begins reading novels,

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he realizes that all novels are different from one another, and, much more obviously, different from all plays or all poems. This difference provides him with the conviction that he, too, could write a novel, and with the further conviction that as wonderful as many novels are, none of them is just right. In fact, none of them exactly fits his experience or his opinions or his ideas of form, so he comes up with a theory of the novel, at least a rudimentary one, and puts it to the test: he writes a novel. This conviction is the source of the originality that we prize as readers, when we delight in P. G. Wodehouse one day and in Honoré de Balzac the next. As a relatively recent form (and not until more recently a respectable form), the novel allows the nascent novelist's theory an entry. And then, at least sometimes, the form itself changes as a result of the novelist's convictions. For some years—twenty or thirty at most—the novelist as a living person coexists with the novelist as a literary persona. Inevitably this coexistence is uncomfortable, and some novelists bear it better than others. The requirements and responsibilities of the literary persona and the living person are different. The first truth about a literary persona is that it is equally the possession of the author and the reader; both create it and both respond to it, since it is made by the act of reading and remembering the novels. When readers are disappointed or angered by the living person of the author, it is because they sense a violation of their own creation. Writers who fail to realize that they have spawned another being, different from themselves but connected, are disappointed, too, or angered by the disappointments and demands of readers. In some cases, innate self-esteem and well-learned good manners go a long way to easing the boundary between the public self and the private self: Edith Wharton, for example, who was well schooled by social position to adopt roles that diverged from her personal preferences, showed unexcelled savoir faire throughout her career, all through the First World War, when she did charity work and war work in France, and in her relations with sometimes prickly colleagues, such as Henry James, who was envious of her commercial success. Other novelists, of course, have been legendary boors, which perhaps they would have been anyway. But the novelist, too, has a relationship with his literary persona that might be somewhat different from his sense of his living self. The literary persona is a much revised and perfected being. It knows how life works and has a fairly complete theory of human behavior. It knows

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how to resolve conflicts and bring about appropriate endings. It is eloquent and fluent. It is consistent and logical. It partakes of the wisdom of all literature that goes before, but has the self-confidence to modify it slightly. It has good comic timing, if need be, and a marvelous sense of the appropriate. More than anything else, it is appealing, because a novel is never coercive and always works by seduction, so the literary persona, even if difficult and obscure, is a successful seducer. And when the novelist reads the works of his own literary persona, he must react to them—he has been conditioned to react to literature by years of reading, so he reacts. Some novelists always have doubts about the literary persona—does it say enough, know enough, or is it a pale shadow of what it might be? Other novelists are fully confident, and even fully realized, in the literary persona. Their difficulty is that they don't feel that they can personally live up to the excellences of the literary persona. While the marquis de Sade's literary persona is superhumanly energetic and brutal in his exploitation of women, for example, the marquis himself seems to have occasionally been a nice man—at any rate, he had a faithful woman friend for his entire life whom he does not seem to have exploited sexually in any way. Anthony Trollope, Jane Austen, and Ford Madox Ford apparently enjoyed and learned from their literary personae. When he read The Good Soldier ten years after writing it, Ford was as delighted as if it had been written by someone else; he called it "My auk's egg"—his once-in-alifetime masterpiece, so accomplished that even he didn't understand how he did it. Trollope and Austen seem to have written in narrative voices very close to their own natural modes of thinking and talking, which would mean that they actually were quite like they presented themselves. Novelists are fully capable of taking advice from their literary personae, at least some of it bad. I would make the case that F. Scott Fitzgerald's bittersweetly tragic worldview, expressed in This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, and then reconfirmed as he reread and rewrote and was praised for these same novels, dictated the tragic arc of his short life. Without the self-reinforcing loop of being seduced by his own literary assertions, he might have lived longer and produced more various work. When critics greeted Jude the Obscure with scathing rejection, Thomas Hardy shut down his novelist persona completely and went on as a poet, but in a different and more robust vein than he had written in as a novelist. It is hardly surprising that a novel that climaxes with a suicide and the murder of five chil-

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dren would end a career, whether reviewers liked it or not. In a different way, Choderlos de Laclos moved away from the calculating, libertine literary persona of Les Liaisons dangereuses, even though the novel was famous and successful. He spent most of his life as a happily married family man. Literary personae aren't necessarily required to typify wisdom, reason, goodness, or even intelligence—some authors, such as Dostoevsky, take passion, radical innocence, holiness, or strong, honest emotion as ideals—but literary personae are required to observe coolly and in detail, since it is the details that progress the story and make it worth reading. This means that every literary persona is at least in some measure less subject to certain venal emotions, such as envy, resentment, feelings of martyrdom and victimization, embarrassment and shame, pettiness and irritability, than living authors are. Even when a narrator, in the apparent voice of the author, expresses such feelings, he is objectifying and observing them, holding them and himself up to the reader's scrutiny. The result of this is that every literary persona is more judicious than almost every author. Perhaps this difference is the source of the endless literary joke, depicted with great wit in John Updike's The Complete Henry Bech, about how smallminded authors are among themselves. They are no more smallminded, I would bet, than other living persons, but they are always more small-minded than their literary personae. In the Bech stories, Updike very cleverly gets to have it both ways—in so closely observing the shortcomings of his protagonist, Henry Bech, Updike gets to both claim them and distance himself from them. It is his narrative voice that simultaneously depicts Henry's sins (including murders of unsympathetic critics and reviewers) and forgives him for them. Updike succeeeds in gaining the reader as an ally—of course, John Updike would never do what Bech does—without so undermining Bech that the reader refuses to read about him. Literary personae bear the onus of the author's expectations, and not every literary persona performs as hoped. At the most basic level, not every literary persona gets great reviews and earns lots of money. Some literary personae coincide with the public taste quite nicely, others thrill the critics, and a few transform society, but almost none do all three. Some literary personae are quite complex and hard to understand, such as that of James Joyce. Some are saccharine or sentimental, such as that of Louisa May Alcott. Others are full of contradictions— D. H. Lawrence, for example, is by turns aggressive, salacious, lyrical,

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insightful, dopey, smart, and embittered. It is important to remember that the author has only limited control over this sort of complexity; his three inspirations—literature, language, and life—combine willynilly to create his literary persona, and they may combine in ways that do not at all mimic the way he leads his life or appears to his acquaintances. However, the living author must accept the limitations of his literary persona, and some authors do so more gracefully than others. Few are as lucky as George Eliot, who began life as a plain and deferential country girl and yet was able to educate herself in a way that allowed her to develop a literary persona that expressed such intelligence, compassion, wit, and range of emotion that she achieved considerable wealth as well as universal respect and acceptance in spite of her unorthodox liaison with George Henry Lewes. As the author gets older and publishes more work, his or her literary persona grows larger, stronger, and more out of control. It may begin to dictate to the author, to limit his freedom of subject and style, even to haunt him, in some sense, especially if earlier work bulks larger in the construction of the literary persona than later work. Readers and perhaps scholars come to know more about the author's work than he does—they might have read and reread a book very recently that the author hasn't read in twenty years, and hold him responsible for sentiments that he not only no longer feels, but can hardly remember. As the oeuvre grows larger and readers come to it differently—almost never, for example, reading the books in the sequence in which they were written—the literary persona takes on more and more layers, made up of more and more things that more and more people have said about it, and also of many things that the author himself might have said in passing to an interviewer, on the radio, or on TV. Many of these layers bear only a glancing relationship to the living author, who gradually diminishes in size relative to his literary persona. The literary persona is a verbal construct but it speaks with a human voice, and to those who don't actually know the author, it seems to be the author. The antidote for the discomforts inherent in such a situation is simple but not easy. The author keeps writing; keeps publishing, if possible; and keeps smiling for the audience and the camera. The more intently he or she focuses on the page being written rather than the career that is developing or disintegrating out there somewhere, the better the work and the happier the living person.

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Eventually, inevitably, mortality decides the competition between the living author and the literary persona in favor of the literary persona, and year by year the living author recedes out of currency and out of memory. The documents and facts about his life get lost or cease to be understandable, and he, too, becomes only a literary construct, and now the construct belongs entirely to readers, plus maybe a biographer or a few scholars. This construct should never be mistaken for the formerly living person. The fact is that upon death, the living person is folded into his or her literary persona and is, for better or worse, beyond resurrection.

4 • The Origins of the Novel

rom our promontory atop Earth's big bookstore, the history of — the novel looks, of course, much different from the way it looked to those who made it. Some novelists and their novels dominate the landscape—Charles Dickens and David Copperfield, Marcel Proust and In Search of Lost Time, Lady Murasaki and The Tale of Genji. Others are fallen monuments—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and The Sorrows of Young Werther, for example. Some novelists can be made out with low-powered binoculars—Balzac, Laurence Sterne. Some who once freely populated the landscape seem to have gone completely underground—Madame de Scudéry and her fellow romancers, or Ouida and Edna Ferber, popular writers of the midtwentieth century, or "the horde of scribbling women" who so tormented Nathaniel Hawthorne. Every novel that now strikes us as original itself originated in a social and artistic network of some sort, because the canon is always being made, remade, and expanded by novelists themselves out of the present stock of available books. Henry Fielding and other eighteenth-century novelists loved Don Quixote. Charles Dickens loved Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Sir Walter Scott, as well as The Tales of the Arabian Nights. Dickens was so influential that later writers shaped their writing in imitation of (or in contrast to) his, and imbibed what he learned from his models secondhand (as well as firsthand if they, too, were fond of his favorite authors). Henry James, who was a young man when Dickens was at the end of his career, gave Our Mutual Friend a bad review. He disdained what he saw as the formlessness of the older man's masterworks. When James had become "the Master," Virginia Woolf was making up her mind about what constituted the best models—she not only revived interest in Jane Austen and George Eliot by writing about them favorably, she also learned things from them. And any woman

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writing novels in English today has read Virginia Woolf and, no doubt, taken her essay A Room of One's Own much to heart. The tradition of the novel is a living legacy from older authors to younger ones. An author may go out of favor, and even seem to disappear, and then be revived simply by the regard of an influential figure who gets others interested in him or her (a novelist also can kill an ancestor, as Mark Twain killed James Fenimore Cooper). Readers are almost always partisan to some obscure author or another, and so, as long as a book is available in Earth's big bookstore (which I construe as every bookstore and every used-book store and every library in the world), it has a chance of finding a new audience. It is not what various academic schools consider to be the great tradition that creates the canon, but what novelists themselves read and carry forward when they write. From the point of view of the working novelist, the history of the novel is just this: plenty of models to learn from and enjoy. Although the novel was invented several times—most notably in 1004 by Murasaki Shikibu in what later became Kyoto, Japan, and once again in the thirteenth century in Iceland, in the form of the Icelandic saga—the modern novel is usually considered to have originated with Don Quixote. Like later novels, though, Don Quixote grew directly out of earlier works, and I think it is productive to look for beginnings of the modern novel right where we look for the beginnings of the modern period, and that is in Florence during the Black Death of 1347—51. As everyone knows, the great plague of the middle of the fourteenth century devastated and transformed Europe, killing between a third and a half of the population of most areas. According to historians, some regions, especially in Scandinavia and eastern Europe, did not recover their pre-plague numbers until the middle of the nineteenth century. Florence, a bustling commercial center, was hard hit. A city of over a hundred thousand, large by standards of the time, Florence lost between two-thirds and three-quarters of its inhabitants to the pandemic. Florence was the home of Giovanni Boccaccio, born in 1313, author of many works, including The Decameron, a cycle of a hundred stories supposedly told by a group of ten young people over the course of ten days in a luxurious retreat from the horrors of Florence (the characters actually stay out of Florence for fourteen days, but religious duties forbade entertainment on Fridays and Saturdays). Boccaccio

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called his work a commedia, which in the parlance of the time meant "any play or narrative poem in which the main characters manage to avert an impending disaster and have a happy ending."* Boccaccio, thirty-five, was already a noted man of letters with several works to his credit when he set to work upon The Decameron. He was not especially happy in Florence, having been obliged to return from the elegant and learned court of Naples in 1341 to a town we might liken to Dallas as opposed to New York City—a town of money, commerce, and philistinism, where Boccaccio's literary and scholarly predilections didn't quite fit in. Before the onset of the Black Death, Florence was already in turmoil—in 1345, two of the great Florentine banking houses collapsed when Edward III of England reneged on his loans, throwing the city into a financial panic. Boccaccio had to scout about for patronage, and he went looking in Ravenna, where Dante, a particular idol of his, had died in 1321. In accordance with medieval convention, all of the strands of Boccaccio's work came from literary antecedents. Compilations of tales were a common form throughout the Middle Ages, and a look at only one of the books Boccaccio is thought to have been familiar with illustrates the multiple traditions he was heir to. The Panchatantra, written in India in Sanskrit before A.D. 500, was probably familiar to Boccaccio through a Latin translation of about 1270 called Liber Kalilae et Dimnae, or the Directorium humanae vitae. The Latin version, by John of Capua, had been translated from Hebrew, which had in turn been translated in the eighth century from Arabic. Even Boccaccio's depiction of Florence in the grips of the plague, ostensibly a firsthand report, was probably borrowed from (or influenced by) an account of an eighth-century Florentine plague from the Historia Langobardorum by Paulus Diaconus ("History of the Lombards" by Paul the Deacon). But the importance of The Decameron as an antecedent of the novel is that it owes as much to Boccaccio's observations of the world all about him, the present life of Florence in 1348, as it does to its literary sources—he took the old material and worked it in the fire of current events. Florence in the mid-fourteenth century was a unique and not quite medieval city, where the merchant and banking classes were *L. Kip Wheeler, "Literary Terms and Definitions, Comedy," http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/ lit terms C.html.

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immensely powerful, where citizens experienced what you might call a modern degree of stimulation and change. As a result, The Decameron bears many of the hallmarks of the modern novel—moral relativity, everyday concerns, and uneasiness about, on the one hand, money, and on the other hand, God. It has celebrity named characters in several stories and average Joes (and Josefinas) in other stories. It observes contemporary manners and ideas. The frame provided by the overt depiction of the plague while it is happening provides a solemn and even urgent undertone to the humorous antics of the tales and the sensuous details of the setting. Some of these characters may soon be overtaken by the general disaster, portrayed by Boccaccio as a moral horror as well as a mortal one; the tales they tell of mutability, of jokes and tricks and miracles, prepare them for their fates as well as distract them. The Decameron, not often read today, is conventionally considered a compilation of erotic tales, but it is far richer than convention implies. Even though many of the plots turn on desire, seduction, and adultery, what makes them interesting and diverse is how the protagonists achieve their ends, and the ramifications of their actions among their friends and associates. The theme of desire is the ground color of the carpet, but ingenuity and idiosyncrasy form the pattern. Some of the tales are quite simple. In the ninth story of the fifth day, for example, a young aristocrat spends all his money futilely pursuing a young woman, who marries another. Now broke except for one cherished possession, an excellent hawk, he moves to a small farm in the countryside. Soon the woman's husband dies, and she and their son move to a large estate that happens to be near the small farm of her former suitor. The child yearns to possess the hawk, and then falls ill. When the woman goes to the protagonist to ask for the hawk, he wants to be hospitable, so he kills the hawk, plucks it, and roasts it for her meal. After they have eaten, she confesses that she has come to ask for the hawk, but alas. Nevertheless, the protagonist has demonstrated that even now he would do anything for his lady love. Soon enough the child dies—"whether from disappointment at not getting the hawk or from the mortal nature of his illness no one knew"—and soon after that, the mother tells her brothers that she would like to marry her poor neighbor. They consent, and all of the protagonist's desires are realized. Other stories are little more than jokes or tricks. In the fourth tale of

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the seventh day, for example, a man locks his wife out of the house. She pretends to throw herself down the well, and when he comes running out, she sneaks into the house and locks him out. She then berates him in front of the neighbors, who call in her brothers, who beat the husband. After they are reconciled, he promises not to be jealous, and to let her do as she pleases, as long as she does it discreetly. In another tale, three men embarrass an elderly and unpleasant judge by pulling his pants down in court. In one very famous tale (fifth day, fourth tale), a girl who wants to entertain her lover persuades her father that she wants to sleep outside on the balcony because it is stuffy indoors, and also she wants to hear the nightingale sing. He agrees with some reluctance, then locks the balcony doors and draws the curtain. She receives her lover, who climbs the vegetation to get to her. They make love so many times ("causing the nightingale to sing at frequent intervals," writes Boccaccio) that they fall into a sound sleep, and when morning comes, the father unlocks the doors and discovers them. He is enraged, and threatens to kill the lover, but is reconciled when the girl and the lover agree to marry on the spot. Boccaccio uses the figure of the nightingale several more times to indicate the joyous lovemaking between the girl and her lover. The tale uses many joke-type conventions—the daughter's attempt to deceive her jealous father, the happy ending, the mother's coolness in contrast to the father's rage, and wordplay. The effect of the story turns not on character but on plot and phrasing. And it is meant to raise a laugh, which it does—in the prologue to the next tale, the narrator reports, "all the ladies laughed so much that it was some time after Filostrato had finished before they had managed to contain their mirth." The sixth story of the ninth day also has wordplay, and a punch line, but it shades rather more toward a story, since it concerns the unexpected transformation of one of the characters. In this case, a young man who loves a young woman persuades a friend of his to help him sneak into the family home, where there is but a single bedroom with three beds and a cradle. When everyone is asleep, the first young man creeps into the bed of his beloved. Soon afterward, though, the second young man goes out to relieve himself. While he is out, the wife wakes up at a sound in another part of the house and goes out naked to check things out. When the second young man returns, he bumps into the cradle and moves it, and when the wife returns, she is misled by the position of the cradle and gets into bed with the second young man,

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who, as Boccaccio writes, "gave her a cordial reception, and without a murmur, tacked hard to windward over and over again, much to her satisfaction." The first young man is afraid to fall asleep and be discovered with the daughter, so he gets up to go back to his bed, but, also misled by the position of the cradle, he gets into bed with the father, and thinking he is with his friend, begins to express his delight in the charms of the girl. The father wakes up and threatens to kill the young man. At this point, the mother awakens and realizes she is in the wrong bed. She saves the day by sneaking into the bed of the daughter, then loudly proclaiming that she has been there all night and nothing has happened. The second young man then starts calling out to the first young man to wake up and stop bragging about doing things that he has only dreamed of. The father starts laughing, the first young man goes back to his bed, and the daughter later convinces the mother that nothing at all happened. "And thus the mother, who retained a vivid memory of Adriano's embraces, was left with the conviction that she alone had been awake on the night in question." Her transformation, though slight, is real—she has enjoyed something illicit and used her wit and discretion to make sure that no ill consequences ensue. Boccaccio's telling gives the whole tale a joyful exuberance that relieves it of its potential for sin and conflict. A later telling, as "The Reeve's Tale," in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, exploits the dark side of the material, but Boccaccio's version reveals a great deal about not only his forgiving view of love and sexuality and his comic turn of mind, but also his graceful and efficient literary style. His choreography of what could be a confusing set of actions is clear and humorous, alternating essential details, such as when the cradle was moved and what people said, with homely nonessentials that give the story verisimilitude (the wife goes out of the room to investigate what the cat is doing). Both the women and both the young men are quick of wit, and the father is fooled, but genially so, in the interests of peace rather than exploitation. Another tale that Chaucer used ("The Clerk's Tale") is Boccaccio's hundredth, the tale of the patient Griselda, whose husband puts her through one trial after another to test her obedience and her devotion. His motive for testing her so severely even over the objections of all his friends and relatives is that he wants to make sure she knows the proper duties of a wife. Hers for enduring is perhaps a tad more convincing—she is well aware of her humble origins, and she has never considered the goods she attained at marriage to be hers. There

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is some implication in the last lines that it is her lowly birth itself that endows Griselda with the fortitude to endure the faked deaths of her children, her apparent abandonment by her husband, and his evident remarriage to a much younger woman. Griselda's tale of goodness (which represents, as well, the proper Christian response to all of the apparently senseless blows life and fate afford) contrasts with tale number one, the tale of the wickedest man who ever lived, a man so wicked that he lies in his deathbed confession, and yet a man who, subsequent to his death, gains a reputation for sainthood and whose posthumous influence actually, according to the story, works for good. In these tales and others, Boccaccio explores complex themes of virtue, vice, salvation, psychological motivation, and forgiveness. Boccaccio was well aware that he was doing something new—at the beginning of the fourth day, he intrudes to defend his work—both that it is written in vernacular prose and that it is written to appeal to women, not scholars. He defends it, paradoxically, as factually correct and as a natural thing for him to do, since he likes women—prose, that is, is meant to be pleasing and accessible. Artistically, though, the main thing Boccaccio had to guard against was the possibility that the stories would run together in the reader's mind and grow repetitious or jumbled. He used several organizational principles to avoid this, including thematic introductions, commentary by the storytellers, and juxtaposition of contrasting tales to one another, as well as a wide variety of settings and plots. But he also used what have become typical novelistic techniques—names, descriptions, quirks of behavior, and characteristic dialogue. His use of these things is so natural that it seems automatic to us, but in fact it sets The Decameron off from other medieval works, such as Le Roman de la rose and Le Morte d'Arthur, whose authors have little understanding of individual psychology. In those works, characters' traits are emblems of their identities or roles rather than ways of being. When the emblem is removed, the character is no longer recognizable to the reader. Action exists in and of itself rather than as a result of psychology. By contrast, in every story of The Decameron, the plot grows out of the idiosyncratic nature of individual predilections or desires. The Decameron became a famous masterpiece almost immediately and retained its allure for hundreds of years. One result of The Decameron s relative "philogyny" (compared with conventional views of women in the Middle Ages) was, for our purposes, the placing of

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women's concerns at the center of the European novel for the next six hundred years. The Decameron was the direct inspiration for Marguerite de Navarre's The Heptameron, the essential transitional work between the medieval story cycle and the modern novel. In many ways, the European novel as we know it today grew directly out of The Heptameron, which is even less well known to modern readers than The Decameron. Marguerite de Navarre was a queen, the older sister of François I, who became king of France in the early sixteenth century. Both François and Marguerite were exceptionally well educated—Marguerite spoke five or more languages, wrote both prose and poetry, and took an earnest interest in the religious controversies of the time; though a Catholic, she was in favor of Protestant-style reforms. In her early thirties, she was delegated to negotiate the ransom of François from the Spanish, who had captured him in battle. A few years later, she married Henri of Navarre (a small kingdom in the Pyrenees now known as Navarra, and part of Spain). Marguerite had a strong interest in literature, and commissioned a French translation oïThe Decameron, but more importantly, she wrote (or compiled) a set of tales intended to be a Decameron for the new age (the 1550s). Who made up the tales, whether Marguerite herself or Marguerite and a set of friends, how far she got (all that remain are seventy-two tales, thus the naming of the compilation The Heptameron), and how the concerns of the tales were to be resolved remain unknown to scholars, but Marguerite stated overtly that the premise of the taletelling was that the tales were all true and that they addressed a single question: is it possible for a woman to know true love and to remain virtuous? This question was to become the central question of most of the novels written in France—and, indeed, in the rest of Europe—until at least the early part of the twentieth century. Marguerite named her ten taletellers with clues to what seem to have been the names of members of her circle, including Henri, who appears as "Hircan." Each tale is followed by a critique, where the tellers do not just react with pleasure, as they do in Boccaccio, but also discuss the characters' actions and the moral implications of each tale. Far more explicitly than in The Decameron, in The Heptameron, the characters are concerned with the difficulties of salvation—there is no easy pleasure and ready forgiveness in Marguerite's book. Though Marguerite and her friends were Catholics, hers was a world where

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religious controversies were of major importance and where prevention of sin was all-important because redemption was felt to be problematic. All of Marguerite's characters, but especially her taletellers, were obliged to look within themselves. By contrast to The Heptameron, The Decameron, even with all of its dark shadings, seems positively rollicking. Boccaccio may include cruel and misogynistic stories, undeserved cuckoldings, and episodes that modern readers find barbaric, but for the most part he seems to be in favor of and forgiving of the pleasures of coupling. For the characters of The Heptameron, though, life is full of hard lessons and double binds, even for the wealthy and privileged. The ten taletellers of The Decameron escape the plague in a pastoral paradise; the ten taletellers of The Heptameron are stuck in a primitive monastery in the midst of inhospitable and unscenic mountains that are filled with wild animals. The world itself is unforgiving, and human society is no less so. What is more troubling for the reader is that Marguerite's tales have so little variety. If The Decameron seems to be an inexhaustible treasury of narratives and characters, The Heptameron seems more like an obsessive nightmare, where the same characters stuck in the same dilemmas return over and over, though with different names and in different guises, to be investigated again and again for some bit of new insight that never turns up. This is fertile novelistic territory. The fortieth story is particularly striking in several ways. It concerns a man and a woman most of the taletellers know, the comte de Jossebelin and his beautiful sister, to whom the comte is very close. Although she is of a marriageable age and has many offers, he refuses to allow her to marry. She falls in love with his favorite gentleman-inwaiting; they marry, and live happily, though secretly, for several years. Their relationship is reported to the comte, who surprises them in bed. The husband escapes through the window, while the wife pleads her case—she is an adult woman and her husband is just the man the comte had always said he wished she could marry, and the two of them are married in the sight of God. They have never done anything unvirtuous. Nevertheless, the comte has the husband caught and killed on the spot, and then imprisons his sister in a remote castle, where she devotes herself to religion. The comte 's six sons "all die miserably," and his daughter inherits the estates. The ten critics try to work out some way of understanding the cruelty of the story. Hircan makes the case that the comte must put down the ambitions of the lower-caste servant, no matter what, but the others are more subtle.

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Two of the women, including Oisille, an older woman who is the most religious, and often the conscience of the group, draw the typical virtuous lesson—every girl must mold her passions in obedience to her family obligations. Nomerfide, though, who doesn't offer an opinion about every story, suggests that the experience of true love and true pleasure compensates for death, because the one is rare while the other is routine. She says, "The pleasure, too, must have been rare, and all the greater, since it runs counter to the views expressed by all wise men, and has in its favor the fact that a loving heart found satisfaction and that a soul found true repose." Others remark on the injustice of the com te 's actions and contrast that to the nature of true love ("though her body was imprisoned, her heart was free and united with God and her husband"). They also point out the political implications of the story—"in order to maintain peace in the state, consideration [in matters of marriage] is given only to the rank of the family, the seniority of the individuals, and the provisions of the law, not to men's love and virtue, in order that the monarchy not be undermined." Often practical sorts of arrangements lead to marital hell, proposes Dagoucin (who is possibly a priest and an abbot), but not always, agree the others, and the married members of the group then congratulate themselves on their luck and skill in gaining marriages that are loving, pleasurable, and virtuous—"So happy were they all that I think the married couples among them did not do quite so much sleeping as the rest— what with talking about their love in the past and demonstrating it in the present. Thus the night passed sweetly until morning broke" (P- 375)Story thirty is as strange (and Oisille remarks that it is the strangest story she can imagine), but the taletellers agree more readily upon an interpretation. A woman has a teenage son who is making a play for a servant girl. The girl reports this, and the skeptical mother declares that she will sleep in the servant girl's bed to see if she is telling the truth. The son does appear, but the mother is still reluctant to believe that he means to do anything. She remains quiet, and then, once he begins making love to her, thinking she is the servant, "so fragile was her nature that her anger turned to pleasure. . . . Even as the dammedup torrent flows more impetuously than the freely flowing stream, so it was with this lady, whose pride and honor had lain in the restraints she had imposed on her own body" (p. 318). The woman gets pregnant. She sends the son off to the Italian wars, gives birth, and sends the baby daughter to her brother, where she grows up. In the meantime, the

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wars end and the son wants to come home, but the mother is now afraid of her own feelings for him, so she tells him that he can't come home until he has married someone he loves. He visits his uncle, unknowingly meets his sister, falls in love with her, and brings her home as his wife. The mother confesses her sins and their consequences to an official, who gets advice from theologians, and everyone agrees that the woman can never tell the children what has happened, but must do penance for the rest of her life. Part of her penance is the sight she has every day of the love between the married couple— "never were a husband and wife so close. For she was his daughter, his sister, his wife. And he was her father, brother, and husband." The woman's sin, all the taletellers agree, has had its origins in her prideful sense of her own virtue, and anyway, points out one of the women, "nothing should induce a woman to risk sharing a bed with a male relative. . . . It's not safe to set a naked flame near tinder" (p. 322). Interestingly enough, the conversation then turns to the ways in which Franciscan monks employ preaching virtue as a method of seduction, and then Hircan points out that the monks of their monastery have failed to ring the evening bell because they are hiding behind the hedge, listening to the salacious stories. What Marguerite and her interlocutors are doing in The Heptameron is experimenting with realism and psychology, two essential characteristics of the novel. Whether or not the stories they tell are true, in their critiques, they treat them as if they were. They discuss motivation, social context, and states of mind before, during, and after the action. They situate even the most shocking events in a generally accepted moral context, and use both common sense and religious precepts as guides to interpretation. They also relate the stories to their own lives by reacting to them, allowing the stories to spark discussions of their own histories. Since they are friends, they do something else that friends often do, which is to call into question one another's interpretations by reminding one another of past mistakes or proclivities (though this is always done in a good-natured way and the group is never unfriendly). Because half of the group is women, and one of them is the queen (and another may be the queen's mother), the dilemmas and traps that confront women are taken very seriously. The ways in which women are agents of their own salvation and damnation are discussed in the context of the ways in which women are subject to the will of others. That women have erotic desires of their own is also a given. The opinions of the men do not take precedence, and the opin-

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ions of Hircan, the king (Henri was eleven years younger than Marguerite), are often politely overlooked, as if their crudity is to be expected. Taken as a whole, The Heptameron is a kind of rough draft for many novels yet to be written; the stories, for the most part simple and plotbased, but dramatic and full of mysteries, are given depth and complexity by means of critical inquiry. In fact, strange tales have often inspired novels—Stendhal wrote The Red and the Blac\ following a newsworthy trial, for example, and Dostoevsky was similarly drawn to the real-life episode that inspired Crime and Punishment. Sensational acts arouse moral curiosity. Onlookers become preoccupied with finding a logic for them that allows them to fit into some theory or other of human nature. Furthermore, the religious beliefs of Marguerite and her friends (Catholic, but with reformist leanings) meant that they mistrusted to some degree the conventional system of precepts and moral rituals. Aware of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation that swirled all about them, they were eager to look within and to discuss, to find a basis of right behavior that was logical as well as uncorrupted. There is a strong sense that notions of class, ethics, custom, and morality that had served in the Middle Ages were breaking down in the middle of the sixteenth century to a degree unknown even during the Black Death, and the point of Marguerite's project is to come up with something, even something provisional, that will serve as a guide to the ten taletellers in lieu of what has been lost. This is a common function of the novel. Both Boccaccio and Marguerite de Navarre were much interested in individuals. In considering human behaviors and misbehaviors, they gave great attention to motives and idiosyncratic circumstances. They sought to understand how points of view differ from individual to individual, and while they accepted the structure of their societies as givens, they thought that both men and women could act for or against the more brutal tendencies of their societies. They saw both men and women as agents of their own salvation or damnation, and they saw the details of such fates as inherently interesting and illuminating. The controversies of the Reformation promoted a believer's sense of his own individuality—he was responsible for avoiding sin and for feeling and demonstrating the presence of God's grace. This gave him (or her) an awareness of the inner life—first of his own, and then of the inner lives of others. Examples of what to do and what not to do abounded, if only one observed closely enough. All of these habits of

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mind fed naturally into the rise of the novel, which organizes itself around individuals and pays attention to the inner life and its relationship to the outer life. And the novel requires conflict, especially inner conflict. The inner conflict of the worried, conflicted believer predisposed him or her to a novelistic state of mind. When Cervantes wrote the first volume of Don Quixote, he put together the elements of the novel with an inspired simplicity that achieved a wide and enthusiastic audience. Don Quixote, like every good protagonist, entered into Cervantes's abundance of material and shaped it around himself, but, as with The Heptameron, the invention of the novel in Don Quixote required a great deal of interpretation and conversation among the characters. To many modern readers, this incessant talking gets in the way of the action, but in fact it was necessary to the engendering of the novel as a form. The novel is self-conscious because modern people feel that they are different from past generations. Don Quixote's conversations with his friends almost all revolve around how current adventures and activities relate to received wisdom, often the wisdom of the medieval romances Quixote is fond of. As the conversations progress, the novel's sense of self-assurance solidifies. Don Quixote's inseparable and necessary companion is Sancho Panza. When Quixote first ventures away from his home, under the spell of his romantic books and eager for knightly experience, he goes alone, but it is evident to the reader as well as to Cervantes that his solitude does not strike exactly the right note—for one thing, he has to express his thoughts too lengthily and too clearly. They seem less like thoughts than discourses, making Quixote pedantic and inhibiting the flow of the action. For another, he seems both too crazy and too vulnerable. His own naïveté and incompetence, combined with the casual brutality of the world of seventeenth-century Spain, make him too pure a figure of pity to succeed comically. He needs a buffer and ally as well as a sounding board, and Sancho, who is practical in some ways, though quite innocent in others, serves both functions. Sancho, as a peasant who is loyal to Quixote but skeptical of his theories, stands between the idealism of Quixote and the realism all around, enabling both sides of the novel's inherent binary nature to flower more naturally than they could in The Heptameron. Quixote is in distinct conflict with his world—it is how he is defined. In this, he differs from the characters in The Decameron, especially, and even from the characters

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of The Heptameron. The variety and richness of those two works paradoxically confirm the social realities that many of the characters of the stories transgress. Even such characters as the sister who watches her brother kill her husband and the mother who is impregnated by her son exist entirely within the social network created by the tales, which in turn are embedded in the social network of the taletelling. The world of The Decameron is in crisis, and the world of The Heptameron is self-contradictory and frightening, but the addition of each tale to the many previous ones reinforces the reality of those worlds. Not so with Quixote. The question arises with Quixote, as with every strong protagonist: does he shape the world, or does it shape him? This question is present in the mere process of the author shifting his attention from Quixote to the world around him and back to Quixote and back to the world around him, realizing each in ever more detail, fitting each more and more to the other in what you might call artistic unity. This is the essential process and power of the novel— to make one cohesive work of art out of many disparate elements, showing the one character in detail while constantly evoking the many that surround him. Don Quixote is the first modern novel because the reader's experience of Cervantes's mind working over this relationship is the first modern example of undiluted authorial consciousness as it unfolds page by page. As with many great works, the original stroke of genius by the author was coming up with a good, simple idea (a middle-aged gentleman who has read so many accounts of knightly courage that he decides to try it himself). That things are not as they seem is the root premise of Quixote's view of the world, but also the root premise of Cervantes's story, because even though things aren't as Quixote thinks they are, they also are not as they seem to the other characters. Only author and reader know the truth. Layers of reality and seeming—of point of view—build upon one another. The history of the novel demonstrates that this simple idea—points of view evoked and juxtaposed—is inexhaustibly fertile. What The Decameron and The Heptameron show with their multitude of briefer and sometimes jokelike stories is that before the end of the sixteenth century (at least in Europe), ways of understanding and depicting the inner life were not rich enough to sustain much narrative length. But the plays of William Shakespeare, written in the 1590s and early 1600s, show that self-consciousness and introspection were bursting out all over. By means of asides, soliloquys, prologues, and epilogues, the playwright was pushing against the boundaries of the drama to display

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and explore the inner life as well as to address the audience unmediated.* The wars, controversies, and religious movements of the sixteenth century required people to look within—life, death, and eternal salvation were at stake. The result was the characteristic rhythm of the realistic novel—action, reflection, action, reflection, action, reflection, for hundreds of pages. It is a hypnotic rhythm. That Quixote is chaste and celibate is also significant, both as a departure from earlier depictions of manly men and as an omen of the future development of the novel. No more rolling in the hay, no more easy acceptance of human sexuality, including the sexuality of women. In Quixote, the opinion of Marguerite's Hircan—that if a woman doesn't yield to his pleasure, he is justified in killing her as a matter of honor—gets tossed into the dustbin of literary history. The religious conflicts of the sixteenth century could not help making sexuality an inflammatory subject, especially since, as both The Decameron and The Heptameron demonstrate, one of the great accusations against the Catholic Church was that while professing celibacy and holiness, its clergy were universally promiscuous—story thirtythree of The Heptameron specifically treats this subject. We may speculate about why Cervantes deprived Quixote of his sexuality, but the effect on later novelists was to provide a model of male virtue that was unusual in its own time but more and more usual in later novels. According to Quixote's friends and the people he meets along the way, his chastity is one of his stranger peculiarities, but as the reader becomes more acquainted with him and grows fond of him, his chastity grows less eccentric and more ideal—evidence of his holy foolishness, as well as of his foolish holiness. Don Quixote was, of course, not the only reason explicit references to sex were dropped from novels, but it set a precedent—two entire books could be written about the inner life of a man who falls asleep whenever discussion of sexual and romantic relationships comes up. An author could make believable a grown male character who has no sexual desires. In part owing to the huge popularity of Don Quixote, the novel gave up a large and fertile subject (at least until the twentieth century), and entered into the idea that because of taboos on sexuality, discussions and depictions of other, more public sides of human nature constituted discussions of all of *For further discussion of this point, please see Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004).

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human nature. The novel, which is simultaneously public and private, published and intimate, has a special capacity to explore the most intimate subjects, but for three centuries it did not routinely explore them, and its avoidance of those subjects made them more and more difficult to discuss. As suggested above, the two volumes of Don Quixote are not the same. The first volume is a more primitive work altogether than the second. Cervantes is less adept at integrating Quixote and Sancho with the characters they meet along the way, and it shares with The Heptameron a quality of disparateness. Shortly after the famous incident of the windmills, for example, Quixote and Sancho attack two friars whom they mistake for kidnappers. They are soundly beaten. Far from an inn, they are taken in for the night by some goatherders, who tell them the sad story of Grisostomo and Marcela—he has died for love of her, and his funeral is about to take place. This story goes on for some twenty-two closely printed pages, and although it is interesting in the context of the preoccupation of the novel as a form with the dilemma of what is to be done with women, it has very little to do with Quixote's adventures. The same is true of the subplot of Cardenio, Dorotea, Don Fernando, and Luscinda, which takes center stage, more or less, for almost a hundred pages (and includes a subsubplot quite similar to story forty-seven in The Heptameron). It is not that these stories are not interesting in themselves, it is that their themes don't fit very well with the themes of Quixote and Sancho's quest. And it is not precisely that Cervantes can't control his material, it is that in the first volume he doesn't realize that it requires control. Quixote and Sancho's quest is meant to be both their story and a frame for other stories. Volume one is more like The Heptameron. Volume two is more like a modern novel—in it, Cervantes has learned how to make Quixote and Sancho central to his novel by deepening their characters and making their adventures grow out of who they are. By far the most important of these is their run-in with the duke and the duchess, which takes up more than half of the volume. Quixote and Sancho meet the duke and the duchess in a wood, and the two aristocrats immediately realize they have indeed met the famous knight and his squire. They then use their wealth and power to devise an elaborate practical joke by which they entertain themselves with the spectacle of Sancho and Quixote acting in character. They tempt Sancho with power—pretending to put him in charge of his own island—and they

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test Quixote with the charms and blandishments of women whom they have paid to tempt him. He remains untempted, but the unrelenting joke exhausts him, and when he goes home afterward, he has lost heart. On his deathbed, he admits that he had been mad, but now he is sane, no longer Don Quixote, but once again Alonso Quijano. His friends plead with him to resume his cause, but he confesses, makes his will, and dies. Don Quixote was instantly popular—so frequently translated that one of Shakespeare's late unfinished plays seems to have been taken from the Cardenio material of volume one.* It was known all over Europe and, no doubt, Madame de La Fayette, who wrote The Princess of Clèves some forty years after Cervantes died, was familiar with, at least, a French translation. But her greatest novel seems to have been much influenced by The Heptameron, since she set it in the 1550s, in the court of Henri II, who was the son of Marguerite's brother François. Madame de La Fayette prided herself on the precision of her historical knowledge and her familiarity with court life of her own day; she would surely have known all about Marguerite and her tales (although our modern edition is different from the edition she would have had access to). We can see The Princess of Clèves as a lengthier and more psychologically detailed answer to Marguerite's original question: can a woman know true love and remain virtuous at the same time? Every word and action of the princess, from the moment she first sees her lover to the end of the novel, models both true love and perfect virtue, an unlikely but dramatic path through the minefield of women's roles and risks in the early modern era. The plot is a typical French plot—a woman with some status but limited money and influence takes her beautiful daughter to Paris to find her a husband. In spite of the girl's beauty, she is unsuccessful at first, and when the girl does attract the attention of the right sort of man, it is someone she likes but does not love, Monsieur de Clèves. Out of prudence, the mother, who is in ill health, presses the marriage. Shortly after the marriage, the most desirable man in France, the due de Nemours, falls in love with the girl. Although she avoids him as much as she can, he is irresistibly attentive, and eventually she falls for him. Her passion is deep and sincere, but as a desperate method of *See Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World.

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avoiding any compromise to her virtue, she confesses her passion to her husband (with whom she has no children, indicating perhaps that their marriage is sexless). The husband is both grieved by her love and gratified by her confidence in him and by her virtue. The triangle, now positively glowing with the frustrated passion of all parties, persists unstably for a short time, and then the husband dies, leaving the princess to marry her lover if she wishes. She does not, partly because she is aware that the knowledge of her passion had contributed to her husband's fatal illness, but additionally, because she also knows instinctively that should Nemours possess her as his wife, his passion would be likely to diminish. As long as the two remain unsatisfied, their love is equal; were she to yield, inequality, and therefore unhappiness on her part, would ensue. This is simultaneously a mere piece of logic that promotes a virtuous outcome and an astute insight into the nature of romantic love as opposed to marital love. Is the princess right or wrong? She trumps her passions with a choice perhaps more plausible to some people than to others—she declares that she owes her truest love to God, and she is going to solve her emotional dilemma by sequestering herself, praying, and doing good works. The Princess of Clèves was a great success, and sparked intense discussion of the princess's unusual strategy for maintaining her virtue. Its plausibility was still being argued in the nineteenth century— possibly every Frenchman in the history of reading, including Stendhal, considered the princess's choices strange, but a glance at the seventy-two attempted solutions that constitute The Heptameron reveals just how hard Marguerite's riddle was. Madame de La Fayette understood her novelist's job—willing suspension of disbelief can be achieved without plausibility when the story is interesting enough to make the reader eager to read on, and reading The Princess of Clèves is intriguing and exciting. Each time the princess does an implausible thing, it seems like the only appropriate thing to do in the context of the story, especially, it seems to me, if the reader is a woman. As a young girl unprotected by family, wealth, or influence, living in a world of gossip and intrigue, the princess knows that her position is especially treacherous—it is probable that the duc de Nemours, for all of his desirability, cannot protect her honor, whatever the power of his affections. By age forty-five, with something like thirty years of court life behind her, Madame de La Fayette was certainly a realist about gossip, status, and intrigue.

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At the same time, Madame de La Fayette had to come up with a technique that would put her story across, and she did so—momentby-moment analysis of her protagonist's state of mind and emotions combined with incisive depiction of court life under Henri II (who is openly unfaithful to his queen). And because the princess has to keep secrets as best she can—given the constant circulation of gossip, she can confide in no one—Madame de La Fayette was forced to anatomize her inner life for the reader to an unprecedented degree, without resorting to Quixote-like conversations between the characters. She pretty much invented indirect discourse—the technique by which an author plausibly "overhears" her character's thoughts and expresses them in a way that seems idiosyncratic to her character. The result is a novel that is strangely modern in its psychological astuteness, far more detailed in this way than any of the works we have so far looked at, and one of the acknowledged great novels of French literature. At the same time, it is not idiosyncratic in its voice, like Don Quixote. As a narrator, Madame de La Fayette stays out of the way of the story, rarely intruding in her depiction of the characters. Her intelligence and originality come in her deployment of story, character, and theme rather than in her expression of her own personality. The Princess of Clives was published anonymously. Madame de La Fayette wanted the princess's story to stand or fall on its own rather than suffering or benefiting from any association with her life or her reputation. More important, the novel is not about the princess's eccentricity, as Don Quixote is about Quixote's eccentricity. What it offers is an alternative plot about the struggle to conform to an ideal in spite of temptation and social pressure. An extravagant style is appropriate to the one; a correct but self-effacing style is appropriate to the other. The career of Daniel Defoe, who was a child in London when The Princess ofClèves was being published, illustrates not only many things about how novelists take up their vocation, but also a great deal about how the novel was invented and then, as it were, franchised. In the first place, since he was a tradesman, importer, and hack writer, Defoe's class loyalties, daily activities, and sensibility were different from those of his predecessors. In addition, by 1700, when Defoe was forty, European religious conflicts had more or less been decided. The assassinations, revolutions, wars, counterrevolutions, inquisitions, tortures, hangings, burnings, murders, mutilations, and terror that marked the seventeenth century had subsided into a more or less territorial config-

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uration of Catholic and Protestant countries that now competed for colonial wealth and trade domination. Capitalism was not as free or as sophisticated as it would be by the time Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations (1776), but it had spread around Europe and was the order of the day in vibrant urban regions. Capitalism, of course, depended upon numeracy and literacy. Defoe was a man of the printed word— he was the first of our originators who depended upon the widespread dissemination of books and pamphlets for a living. As a result, he was drawn to sensational subjects, because they were the most likely to sell. At the same time, Defoe's Nonconformist religious training gave him a sense of sympathetic connection with subjects not previously given serious literary treatment—prostitutes, servants, criminals, working men and women, courtesans, adventurers of all stripes. Defoe knew from going to chapel that all humans could look within and inventory their virtues and defects, and were, therefore, suitable protagonists for novels. Defoe was no less interested in the condition of women than our four previous authors—both Moll Flanders and Roxana deal frankly with the stark choices many women must make between virtue and survival. For his characters, though, the choices were neither sentimental nor abstract—giving up one's virtue was often the only way for a woman to survive, and one of Defoe's pamphlets was a defense of women's rights. His great technical innovation, though, comparable to Madame de La Fayette 's invention of indirect discourse, was narrating in the first person rather than the third person. One of Defoe's hack writing jobs was criminal confessions. Criminals were celebrities in early-eighteenth-century England. In the complete absence of a social safety net, theft, murder, and other forms of violent crime were commonplace, and prostitution, child abandonment, and child-selling were routine, even though the laws against all of these transgressions were strict, punishments were harsh, and recidivism was the order of the day. Sensational crimes were written up and published, and when especially famous criminals came to be hanged (in public, as examples), writers such as Defoe composed their confessions. Defoe also was used to writing in his own voice—he wrote essays and polemics on politics, he wrote a travelogue of a journey around the British Isles, he wrote about a haunting. When, nearing sixty, he came to writing The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the first-person point of view was utterly natural to him, but it changed the nature of the novel, plunging it into the subjective realm and shifting the

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balance between the inner life and the outer life. The narrative still moved between actions and reflection, but now the actions were depicted entirely through the filter of the narrator's mode of reflection. An author need no longer cultivate a particular style that he used to tell many types of stories—varying his tone, perhaps, but retaining his authority. Defoe experimented with different styles—that is, different inner lives—for different narrators. Crusoe approaches everything practically, including his salvation. Moll Flanders is breezier and livelier than Crusoe—although she has been and remains a bit shocked by some of the things that have happened to her, her vitality seems like her natural counterweight to a sense of sinfulness. The narrator of A Journal of the Plague Year is more cautious and precise than either of the other two, almost entirely self-effacing and yet quite particular in his depiction of the catastrophic epidemic. Roxana, the protagonist of Defoe's last novel, is the most complex. She is a realist about what she has been required to do over the years to survive, but she is also tormented by her actions—in particular, at the beginning of the novel, when Roxana's husband abandons the family, she starves with the five children for a while, but, realizing that everyone is going to die, she consigns the baby to the parish and perpetrates a ruse upon her husband's sister (who is more prosperous), to plant the older four children in that family. The oldest daughter is subsequently sent away as a servant by the sister-in-law, but the girl returns to haunt, and endanger, Roxana, who more or less colludes, or at least acquiesces, in her death. It is a dark and complex novel, and the female voice is thoroughly convincing. As a gloss on the theories of Thomas Hobbes and their origins in the social conditions of England, it could not be more convincing. What Defoe was after was not so much sympathy as empathy—not so much "feeling with" a protagonist, but "sensing through" him or her. All of Defoe's protagonists are morally problematic; all have committed sins and crimes, and, more important, all have committed cruelties, but all are also burdened by awareness of not only the sins but also the circumstances that gave rise to them. This moral ambiguity perfectly suits both the novel's focus on the inner life and also the tendency of prose to proliferate, making finer and finer distinctions at greater and greater length. In fact, Defoe's protagonists (with the exception of his first, Crusoe) tend to be so subjective that the world they live in is depicted only in passing. They hardly bother setting a scene or describing a person or a place. Emotions are portrayed and alluded to, but the realest part of the inner life of Defoe's characters is

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the activity of weighing right and wrong against necessity and desire. And yet Defoe's novels are filled with energy and rarely depressing. There is no ennui in Defoe's characters. They take an active interest in practical matters—Robinson Crusoe, of course, is famous for his enterprise, but Roxana provides plenty of interesting information on many topics, ranging from how to foist your children off upon your relatives (which she must do in a particular way because of parish pauper laws), to how to transfer a large sum of money from one country to another, to how to conduct affairs of mutual benefit with married men. Defoe's characters readily comprehend that survival is a full-time job requiring cleverness and application as well as luck. And because Defoe's women characters are on their own, they have an answer to a perennial European question: what is the purpose of women? It turns out that their purpose is work, same as men. The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, which was published anonymously in 1719, was a sensation. Within a year of publication, it was translated into several other European languages in, of course, pirated editions. Defoe's later novels (five in three to four years, along with other books) did not cause quite the stir as his first, and he did not receive royalties—each was a one-off. Defoe died in 1731 somewhat mysteriously, away from his family and hiding from creditors. Did immediately subsequent novelists learn from him? On the one hand, Robinson Crusoe was the most successful novel of the eighteenth century, and Moll Flanders and Roxana went through many editions in which they were cleaned up and morally improved; on the other hand, Defoe's subject matter was so sensational and lacking in respectability that if novelists such as Fielding and Richardson learned something from Defoe, perhaps they would not have admitted it. Intention, though, is not the same as effect. Defoe might not have intended to broaden the audience and the subject matter of the novel; he might have intended only to make money. Even so, he often wrote books with a didactic purpose. His first work, a pamphlet of 1689, justified the Glorious Revolution (the accession of William of Orange, a Protestant and a German, to the English throne). He wrote The Family Instructor, the two-volume Complete English Tradesman, and The Complete English Gentleman, as well as his essay on the rights of women. In fact, Defoe was so successful in democratizing the English novel that writers of later generations of the eighteenth century—into the career of Jane Austen—expended considerable effort giving the novel a higher tone.

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Even though writers all over Europe (and the world, if we include The Tale of Genji as one of our most original and influential novels), invented and reinvented the novel, it took hold as an established form in England about two generations before it took hold in France and elsewhere owing to the economic and social conditions in England that promoted literacy. One of the first newly literate groups, for example, was the large class of ladies' maids who worked from age fourteen or so in wealthy houses all over England, who had a fair amount of leisure time, who lived in close proximity to books and educated employers, and who were themselves required to exhibit a certain amount of refinement, but the growing eighteenth-century audience for the novel was diverse. As a result, each of the great English novelists of the eighteenth century brought something innovative to the new form. In 1740, a London printer named Samuel Richardson galvanized the literary world with his epistolary novel Pamela. Pamela began as a model letter in a small instructional book Richardson had written, meant to show the newly literate classes how to write proper letters on various topics and for various purposes. Pamela's letter is that of a servant girl to her parents about her employment on a large estate. Richardson seems to have quickly understood both the thematic and the dramatic possibilities of Pamela's situation, and, seized by inspiration at age fifty, he became a novelist. Pamela, who is in the Dissenting habit of confessing to her parents to seek their advice on how to live a godly and virtuous life, reports the death of her mistress, and shortly thereafter that her young master, Mr. B., seems intent upon seducing and then raping her. According to Pamela, her sole concern is to maintain her virtue and the purity of her soul for reasons of faith. Mr. B. has her abducted, held against her will, drugged, and pinned down while he attempts to outrage her virtue. He then tries a false marriage. Eventually, though, he falls in love with Pamela and decides to marry her in reality, mostly because he is very impressed with her tenacious grasp upon her virtue and with her literary style, which he has read in her letters. At that point, his sister strongly resists the marriage, and Pamela begins writing about larger issues of the true nature of love and marriage. Upon publication, Pamela was a popular success, which meant that readers all over England and even France (the French polymath and encyclopedist Denis Diderot was inspired by Pamela to try novelwriting as well) could make up their own minds about Pamela's logic. The great innovation of Richardson's epistolary form was a sense of

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intimacy and immediacy. Modern readers might find the idea that Pamela could retire to her closet and write at length about her adventures, her feelings, and her ideas even in the midst of being pursued entirely unbelievable, but Richardson's contemporaries were willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoying Pamela's spirited resistance. In some sense, an epistolary novel is like a movie—we seem to be watching it while it is happening, and it therefore gains an extra degree of unpredictability and suspense. Other types of first-person novels are necessarily written after the fact, which means that the narrator has survived, and assimilated his experiences at least to a degree. The epistolary novel can more closely resemble the actual passage of consciousness through time, especially in an epistolary age, when average people are in the habit of regularly reporting on their thoughts and reading the reports of their friends. There is no denying that Pamela and her novel are simultaneously ridiculous and compelling. Richardson's novel also had a strong (and possibly unintended) political dimension. The basic question Pamela asks is: do I belong to my master, or do I belong to God? Is her virtue hers to dispose of, her master's to take, or theirs to preserve? When the subject turns to love, do property and class issues trump emotional ones? Has Pamela proved herself and her arguments? Pamela is openly and directly about power: what are its limits and how are they to be maintained? The very epistolary unfolding of Pamela's dilemma intensifies the importance of these questions—after all, Moll Flanders and Roxana have already lived their lives. Their task as they set down their adventures is to decide whether and how to repent—to decide the meaning of their adventures. The outcome of Pamela's story is not yet decided as she is writing, so part of her task is to come up with strategies for outwitting Mr. B., at first, and then later, reasons for deciding whether his reformation is real. All of these questions, since they are about power, implicitly link the personal and the political; as soon as Pamela gained a multitude of readers, the issues became explicitly political, as highly charged issues in popular novels tend to do. If a reader were sympathetic to Pamela's defiance, might he or she be sympathetic to the defiance of other women to the demands of property and class, not to mention to the sexual urges of men? One of Samuel Richardson's contemporaries who was not impressed was Henry Fielding. Fielding began as a playwright, but English theaters of his day were subject to licensing laws, and as a

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result of one of Fielding's satiric attacks upon the government, his theater was closed. He turned to writing novels, and his first effort was a pastiche that mocked Pamela, titled Shamela, that picked up on some of the sillier aspects of Pamela's story. Fielding had enough success with his short novel that he decided to try another approach, so he wrote Joseph Andrews, allegedly the story of Pamela's brother, also a servant, who has his own troubles with Lady B., Mr. B.'s lascivious sister. Fielding's masterpiece, though, owes more to Don Quixote, a book Fielding loved. In Tom Jones, his eponymous hero, Tom, is exiled from the estate of his foster father, Squire All worthy, and forced to seek his fortune on the road to London. At the same time, Squire Western, Allworthy's neighbor, decides to force his daughter Sophia to marry Allworthy's nephew (and Tom's enemy) Blifil, to consolidate the two properties. Tom is an attractive young man, and encounters (unlike Quixote) several challenges to his virtue both on the road and among the worldly aristocrats in London. Finally he finds himself in danger of hanging, but just in time, all of Blifil's schemes are unraveled, and Tom (and Sophia) are saved. As a dramatist, it was natural for Fielding to import conventions of the English theater into the novel, and he did, including wit and comedy, an exciting plot that turns on the villainy of Tom's antagonist, and also the standard comic ending—love, reconciliation, and prosperity (which in pre—Industrial Revolution England meant real estate). Fielding's England was a manly, robust, rough place not that different from Cervantes's Spain, except that a pastoral paradise was to be found in England, among the country estates of such responsible and thoughtful members of the gentry as Squire Allworthy. Fielding was by no means progressive, though he was skeptical of religion and leery of forcing young women to marry against their will. Above all, he was humane. He recognized the temptation for people of privilege to abuse their privileges and overlook their obligations; he portrayed members of all classes acting not only foolishly and ridiculously but also coarsely, selfishly, and brutishly. His dearest virtue (the one that in Tom himself balances all his faults and accounts for some of his mistakes) was openheartedness. But the purpose of the plot of Tom Jones is never to spread the wealth around—it is always to consolidate (country) property and attach it to right feeling. If a certain amount of fun can be had in the bargain, so much the better. Because Fielding was classically educated, and because he made a strenuous effort to do so, he raised the tone of the novel by calling Tom Jones a

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"mock epic" and including extensive commentary that explicitly linked the story to classical models. Later novelists could read Tom Jones (and Fielding's other novels) with both pleasure and selfsatisfaction—he was respectable. In 1759, Laurence Sterne, too, came to novel-writing from another career. He was a clergyman, accustomed to writing sermons, discussing morals and values, and finding general lessons in specific examples of human behavior. But Sterne was an odd duck and not terribly successful in his clerical role. He was also writing at a time when what was called "feeling" but perhaps what we would call "sentimentality" was replacing sharp satire as the fashion. Defoe's Roxana, for example, still in print, was extensively rewritten by late eighteenth-century publishers of new editions to mitigate Roxana's seeming indifference toward her children and her less than satisfactory repentence at the end. And whereas Richardson went from Pamela's two-volume rape in 1740 to Clarissa's seven-volume rape in 1748, investigating ever more carefully and fully both Clarissa's point of view and that of Lovelace, her abductor, Sterne's protagonists, Mr. Shandy (the father of Tristram) and Uncle Toby, were hardly interested in sex at all. Uncle Toby, in fact, who comes more and more into prominence as the novel proceeds, is of a singularly modest turn of mind, much more interested in playing an elaborate form of toy soldiers in his garden than paying attention to the widow over the hedge. What Sterne cared about, what constituted his innovation, was human, and especially male, eccentricity. Defoe's characters, Fielding's characters, and the characters in Pamela were intended, at least at the beginning, to typify or represent their categories. As the plots of the novels developed, the protagonists individualized themselves, but the dramatic tradition was so strong in England that thinking of human psychology as typology was automatic—in a drama, the actors inhabit the characters and can't help but individualize them, so the author can focus more on the action than on shades of human uniqueness. Sterne, however, as a writer of sermons, did not organize his characters in the same way, and he was not so attached to plotting as an organizational method. He presented his characters as eccentric from the beginning; in fact, the action of Tristram Shandy progresses more and more slowly in part because Sterne's (or the narrator's) theory of psychology is based on uniqueness—the unique circumstances of Tristram's conception (his father cries out in annoyance at the moment of ejaculation) and birth (the doctor presses the baby's

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nose with the forceps, thereby, by symbolic extension, damaging his penis or his libido). Sterne's ideas have their origins in the vagaries of thought and the contingencies of circumstance. If all novels have two sides—the public and the private—the privacy Sterne explores is even more extreme than that of Richardson because it is more idiosyncratic. Unlike Pamela, Clarissa, and Lovelace, Mr. Shandy, Uncle Toby, and the narrator are not attempting to conform at all. In any novel, what is most original is always what is most intimate (though the converse is not true—often intimacies are related in quite conventional ways, importing the public into the private and showing that an author's ideas of intimacy aren't very original). Sterne significantly extended the private, philosophical side of the novel, as, mA Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe extended the public, documentary side of the novel. The very fact that few authors have followed these two models subsequently shows how demanding and unusual they are, and how much more readily the novel shapes itself to the fairly equal representation of inner life and outer life, of the individual and the group. By the time of Sterne's death, the novel was fully invented and, indeed, franchised. It was a popular and exciting literary form. Enterprising dramatists, poets, and intellectuals were frequently moved to try writing a novel or two. More important, novels were regularly published that became all the rage—sometimes because they were so shocking, at other times because they were so funny or moving. Translations were common, so that novels such as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe were available to numerous readers who lived in places and at times entirely remote from Spain in 1610 or London in 1719. Later authors would go on to expand the scope of the novel, to refine its rhetoric, to challenge its readers, to modify how quality in the novel should be defined, but lengthy written prose narratives with protagonists, narratives that regularly alternated between depicting the actions and the inner lives of their characters, narratives that focused on the adventures of individuals and their context within small groups and large groups, narratives that defined reality sometimes as objective and sometimes as subjective, narratives with complex plots and narratives with hardly any plots at all had made their appearance and did not have to be invented again.

5 • The Psychology of the Novel

Whereupon this worthy knight, whose swordplay was doubtless on a par with his storytelling, began to recite his tale, which in itself was indeed excellent. But by repeating the same phrases, and recapitulating sections of the plot, and every so often declaring that he had "made a mess of that bit," and regularly confusing the names of the characters, he ruined it completely. Moreover, his mode of delivery was completely out of keeping with the characters and the incidents he was describing, so that it was painful for Madonna Oretta to listen to him. She began to perspire freely and her heart missed several beats, as though she had fallen ill and was about to give up the ghost. -GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO,

The Decameron

he basic substance of imaginative literature (novels, plays, poetry) is not reason but emotion, which is expressed not by the denotations of words, nor the grammar of the sentences, but through the connotations and colorations of the words as employed by the author's style. Once a story has been put into words, people can analyze it, ponder it, hold it in their minds, come to know it, change it willingly, learn from it. But it exists not as words written in books but as images with feelings attached. To read and then reread a work is to reattach remembered images to unremembered words and to experience again (and sometimes even more sharply) the pleasure of the

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inchoate becoming specific. Both writer and reader experience the same basic pleasure—something in one form in the mind takes another form on the page, something in one form on the page takes another form in the mind. This is the essential pleasure of literature, ideas going into and out of words over and over and over, any time the reader opens a book, or the author takes up a pen. The sheer length and accessibility of the novel, though, changes a reader's experience of this process in specific ways, because the number of words and their connections expand toward the infinite—ideally, in a hundred-thousand-word book, every word could relate to every other word in some unique way, and no conventional forms (as in poetry) or interpreters (actors and directors) are present to limit or guide the reader's intuition. Scholars and critics have despaired of coming up with a method that is various enough for understanding the novel, and their despair is warranted—in a novel such as Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows, where every word seems to relate to and reflect upon every other word, building layers of meaning and feeling that seem to shift continuously, all critical methods are of only modest usefulness. A lively intuition, though, can make it all out to a satisfying degree. Any reader's list of her ten favorite novels exhausts the interpretive capacities of generations of critics, but is readily accessible, over and over, to the reader herself. In fact, the accessibility of the novel renders critical interpretations superfluous to the reader/author interaction. A novel may be read on all sorts of levels, as articles and controversies in scholarly journals show, but it can be enjoyably and correctly read just to see what happens next and to enjoy the company of the author, the narrator, and the characters. Each of the elements of the definition of the novel has an effect on the psychology of reading the novel. For example, narrative voice is social, and so the psychology of the novel is a psychology of relationships, even if the novel is about an isolated loner such as Robinson Crusoe, or Franz Kafka's Josef K. in The Trial. Since the mere existence of the narrative voice implies a teller, a listener, and other beings who are being told about and implies, therefore, relationships, every reader comes to every novel with plenty of experience that bears upon the reading of a novel. The qualities of the voice are automatically present—is it warm, friendly, knowledgeable, soothing, charming, intelligent, self-obsessed, droning, bombastic, mechanical, silly, beside the point, suspect? The reader perceives and reacts to these qualities

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instantly, without thinking. If she likes the voice and feels comfortable with it, she may not actually think at any time, except to process the characters and events of the narrative, but such processing isn't exactly cogitating. A novel that is a comfortable fît with the reader, whose characters and narrative voice the reader is drawn to and enjoys, whose jokes the reader laughs at, and whose insights the reader understands and appreciates, arouses a sense of friendliness. With such a novel—let's say Persuasion—the reader's responses feel harmonious and agreeable. She recognizes the crass insensitivity of Anne Elliot's father and sister and the tediousness of Anne's old-maid existence; she understands how the naval officers and their wives offer a welcome breath of exotic practicality to Anne's social life; she follows the subtle changes in Anne's feelings toward Captain Wentworth; she is in sync with the play of Jane Austen's wit. When she retreats from the flow of the narrative into judgment, it is to appreciate scenes or phrases or even to marvel at them. The relationship the reader has with such a novel feels reciprocal though it is not. The reader is supplying both the give and the take that furnish such a reading experience with a feeling of conversational intimacy. Of course, the author is as familiar as the reader with social intercourse; he (or in this case, she) is using the forms and tones of social intercourse to communicate the ideas in her novel because she cannot help doing so. When an author writes, she is communicating with herself; when a reader reads, she is communicating with herself, but when she feels a sense of kinship with a particular novel, she feels that the author is communicating with her. If the reader doesn't like the voice, though, she starts to think, should I keep reading this, or should I stop? She weighs her boredom or dislike against what she is getting from the novel. With a novel such as Vanity Fair, for example, where the tone of the narrative voice is very cynical and where the characters may be hard to like (and the drawings, by Thackeray himself, might be unappealing), she withdraws a bit from the experience of the novel (maybe even while continuing to read) and concocts an argument about whether to go on and for how long. After another ten or twenty pages, perhaps, she puts the book down and walks away. Sometime later, she comes back and sees the book. Then she makes another decision whether to pick the book up and start reading again. This decision is not unlike choosing to call someone who isn't a bosom friend—will the payoff for picking the novel up again outweigh the discomfort already experienced (and already associated with everything about the novel, including the

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picture on the cover and the color and smoothness of the paper)? If she picks it up again and goes on with it, she reaffirms her commitment, but this can work in two ways. One way, of course, is that she presses ahead to the end of the novel and finishes it, adding to whatever pleasures she ultimately gets from it a sense of accomplishment and relief. The other is that as her commitment deepens, she comes to resent the novel more and more for being so intransigently itself, and this resentment might cause her to throw down the novel in disgust after two hundred or three hundred pages. If she had simply never picked the novel up again after the first few pages, she might never have felt resentment or disgust at all, just a vague sense that the novel didn't have anything to do with her. Every novel, every narrator can't help offering the promise of a relationship. Of course, a reader may begin by disliking Vanity Fair but be won over in the end to liking it very much. The novelist has many pleasures to offer—the unusual pleasure of the exotic, the intellectual pleasure of historical understanding, the humane pleasure of psychological insight into one or more characters, the simple pleasure of entertainment and suspense, the exuberant pleasure of laughter and trickery, the guilty pleasure of gossip, the tempting pleasure of secrecy and intimacy, the confessional pleasure of acknowledged sin and attempted redemption, the polemical pleasure of indignation, the rigorous pleasure of intellectual analysis, the reassuring pleasure of identification with one's nation or people, and the vicarious pleasure of romance. The reader may gradually set aside the discomfort of incompatibility and come to enjoy any or all of these pleasures by the end of the novel, and if the incompatibility stems more from unfamiliarity than anything else, then she has many hundreds of pages to get used to the novelist's way of thinking and of expressing himself. If the incompatibility comes from a disagreement in opinions, then the reader has hundreds of pages to understand and to learn to agree with the author's arguments. The author can employ different sorts of logic—the logic of cause and effect as expressed in the scenes; the logic of character—whether thoughts and actions hang together and make sense; the logic of theme—whether the author's argument about how the world works makes sense; the logic of structure—whether the parts of the novel work together. There is also a logic of style—how the diction and grammar the author uses at the beginning of the novel prepare the reader for the diction and grammar he uses in later sections (an example of success on this score is Anthony Trollope's The

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Last Chronicle ofBarset, in which the reader is prepared by the way the author discusses the intricacies of a troubled but loving marriage at the beginning of the novel for his analysis of a troubled and loveless marriage at the end). The reader may recognize that the author has set out to manipulate her in a certain way, to use one or more of his available logics to persuade her of his ontological theory—Thackeray may have intended to show the inexorable decline of honor among Englishmen of breeding and education—but as the materials of his novel coalesce, she recognizes elements that are contradictory, that the author didn't intend, hadn't thought of, and possibly never understood. In Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp disappears ignominiously toward the end of the narrative; unlike Lily Bart, in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, she is not even allowed the dignity of a tragic death. Without her, the energy of the novel dissipates and the novel's only possible hero, the faithful William Dobbin, discovers himself obscurely dissatisfied with his happy ending. Although Thackeray portrays Becky as a selfish arriviste, a pathological liar who is perhaps capable of murder, and an almost certainly unchaste adulteress, she seems to have certain qualities of insight, intelligence, and vitality not allowed any other character. Thackeray seems to like her in spite of himself, as if only conventional propriety is preventing him from awarding her some final triumph. Did Thackeray intend such a combination of vice and energy? Did he even understand Becky's grandeur? Was she a product of his art or an unintended consequence? A reader can find herself beguiled by the confluence of the authorial intentions and lucky accidents of composition as readily as any other pleasure. Some authors deploy their modes of seduction more gracefully than others, but what they are all trying to achieve in the reader is what length itself demands: willing suspension of disbelief. There are two halves to this equation: "willing" and "suspension of disbelief." It is far more difficult to make the second half work than the first, because no amount of plausibility really overcomes the definition of a novel as fiction. Usually, what puts a reader into a state of willingness is an interesting assertion, such as "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife" (Pride and Prejudice), or "Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically" (Lady Chatterley's Lover), or "It was the best of times,

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it was the worst of times" (A Tale of Two Cities). But a character may also do an interesting or appealing thing, such as "Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file" (As I Lay Dying), or "Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed" (Ulysses). At the beginning of "The Metamorphosis," Kafka has Gregor Samsa change into a bug, perhaps one of the most intriguing first premises in literature. However, in teaching this story twenty-two times to undergraduate students, I found that out of every thirty students, one or two were simply unwilling to believe that Gregor could turn into a bug, and for those students, the story offered no charms at all. It was not that the other students believed that a man in Prague in 1915 turned into a bug; it was that they enjoyed the idea and suspended disbelief, and once they imagined Gregor's bugness, they were open to every other idea that Kafka had to offer. Willing suspension of disbelief is a strange state of mind—reading nonfiction does not require it and neither does reading poetry, since both are based on logical argument. Many intelligent and educated persons resist it entirely or yield to it only for a brief time, in the darkness of a theater, accompanied by other members of an audience—the world is full of people who are rather proud that they don't read novels. Publishers often lament that the audience for novels is narrowing, and especially that it is losing men. A literary education not only enlarges a reader's willingness to suspend disbelief by extending her range of pleasures, it also strengthens her ability to enter the meditative state, and to be receptive to the influence of another human mind, because it is a state of contemplation that is essential to the true appreciation of the novel. While all art forms promote this state of receptivity, with the novel it is uniquely sustained—it is not possible, for example, to contemplate a painting for ten or twelve hours, the amount of time the average reader would need to read a five-hundredpage novel. Few dramatic productions run for more than four hours, and even that length of time is considered daring. How long is Wagner's Ring cycle? Fifteen hours is perhaps equivalent to reading Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her?, and nowhere in the region of any of the great meganovels such as Proust's In Search of Lost Time. For some readers, of course, eight to ten hours spent reading a novel in a receptive state of mind is the only quiet, contemplative time they can afford, and the opportunity to suspend so much disbelief, to follow

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a single line of thought, is comforting as well as entertaining and enlightening. When the reader accepts the first line of a book, she agrees to think about the same things, and in the same degree of detail and in the same order, that the writer has chosen to think about. While she is reading the book, she is thinking about them simultaneously with the author. Although in book form the novel precedes her contemplation of it and may historically precede her very existence, as a novel it unfolds in the author's mind and her mind simultaneously. The recognition of this effect of the novel, and of its uniqueness in literature, was the revelation that enabled Marcel Proust to write In Search of Lost Time. Proust knew that he could not achieve the sense of reexperiencing important episodes that he sought if he were to write an overt memoir because a memoir has to seem true (both factual and incomplete). He preferred to use the conceit of a memoir but to write a novel, which enabled him to pick and choose aspects of his experience that he found "useful to my theme," as he said, and to elaborate as much as he wished. Because of the way that the novel unfolds in the mind of the willing reader, she cannot be "wrong" in her response to it—the fact that the novel is created only in her mind while she is reading it gives her sole possession of it. Outside of literature, maybe the closest thing to this is a guided meditation, where the voice of a guru suggests images and ways of thinking that are intended to result in a particular state of mind. Presumably, as he speaks, the guru is meditating on the same images he is speaking of. But few guided meditations go on for twenty-six hours (the length of a full recorded reading of my novel Horse Heaven). Rather, the voice of the guru fades away after a while, having induced in the student's mind an absence of voice or image. A novel, too, induces a contemplative state of mind, but rather than emptying it, it fills it with many different thoughts and feelings. Present with the reader in her mind is the individuality of the writer, whose idiosyncratic phrasing, ideas and emotions, fears and desires are guiding her and influencing her and inviting her to react. However, not every state of willing suspension of disbelief is the same. A novel directs the reader's contemplation of it. Even when a reader likes four different novels equally, and is equally receptive to them, she won't read Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities in the same manner that she will read Halldor Laxness's Independent People, or even in the same manner that she will read another great modernist

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novel such as Ulysses. A page-turner offers the pleasure of suspense (this is one of the pleasures of the tale), but in an epic, more than moderate suspense might be a fault. In an epic, the unhappy outcome of the novel is shadowed forth early on. Relentless page-turning gets the reader only where she knew she was going in the first place, and it gets her there faster, without sufficient time to ruminate upon the qualities of the epic protagonist that make him or her interesting and worth reading about. Novels with a large component of travel narrative, such as Moby-Die^, are meant to meander so that the writer and the reader can gaze at the scenery and appreciate its exotic qualities. One of the problems some modern readers have with Melville is that they don't have the patience to realize that the psychological and plot elements of his stories are intentionally set into a wide landscape that is meant to comment upon and contrast to the narrow intensity of human desires and preoccupations. A novel such as The Man without Qualities is an argument about the nature of modern life presented in a highly figurative and epigrammatic style. If the reader doesn't go slowly enough to follow Musil's argument and think about his analogies—if she isn't as precise in her reading as he is in his writing—then the novel will pass her by almost completely. A romantic novel—let's say Jane Eyre—offers the reader still another dilemma. Everything in the plot and character depictions pulls her toward the climax that is to unite the protagonists, but for the story to be worth reading, the protagonists and their ups and downs have to be depicted and read about with care; the suspense of a romantic novel can actually get very strong even though author, reader, and convention all foreshadow the outcome and even when, in rereadings, the reader knows the outcome quite well. Novels have protagonists; protagonists, like narrators, have points of view. Point of view is like perspective in a realistic painting—it changes the size and shape, the nature and identity, of characters, objects, and events in accordance with their proximity to the viewer. Since a reader naturally has a point of view, her own, she readily accepts the simple humanity of point of view in a novel. By contrast, because at first glance nothing differentiates the protagonist in a play or a movie from the other humans around him or her, an audience member needs to be told whom to attend to and empathize with. Point of view in a movie or a play is superimposed by language, camera angles, stardom, voice-over.

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The novel, of course, shares point of view with poetry, sharing also the quality of perspective. But the poem—at least the modern poem— usually does not excel at narrating events (and since the rise of the novel, hasn't been asked to do much of it). It excels, rather, at making events stand still for a moment so that some meaning or feeling can be wrested from them by ever more precise and evocative use of language, language that is supposed to cause the reader to stop rather than go. Action, all going and no stopping, is for plays and movies—movies that have nothing else have action. Even plays that have nothing else have talk, which is a type of action. The novel is the only imaginative form that must have both action and point of view, suspense and reflection. In this it seems to mimic the way life feels. Every novel, then, is a guided meditation on a common thing, common both in the sense of "mundane" and in the sense of "shared"— action and reflection as perceived from a particular point of view. Perhaps this is the reason novelists are generally run-of-the-mill sorts of people, not experts, not possessed of prodigious resources in any specialized realm. Would anyone read a hypothetical novel by Albert Einstein? We can imagine the publisher's blurb: "In this page-turning, soul-wrenching work of genius, Time and Distance, the smartest man of the twentieth century tells the story of a fascinating marriage, the passionate ups and downs and the numbing but illuminating details of daily life, alongside the exciting adventures of new ideas and the final flight from tyranny!" Or, perhaps, a novel by Donald Trump, "Bric\ by Bric\, a strangely lyrical investigation into wealth, corruption, fame, and fashion." And yet every day we read and enjoy White Teeth, which was written by a twenty-five-year-old girl; Rabbit Is Rich, which was written by the only son of a schoolteacher from a small town in Pennsylvania; Persuasion, which was written by the second daughter of a minor landowner in Hampshire, England; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by a small-town boy from a small midwestern state; and Dead Souls, written and partially destroyed by the son of a moderately wealthy minor official from Ukraine. It is hard to overestimate the importance of this quality of commonness to the nature of the novel; it enables a reader to relax with a novel as with another person, and also to feel as though the novelist might have something to say of relevance to the reader's own common life. When NASA sent a capsule into space a couple of decades ago, carrying schematic drawings of a man and a woman, a few mathematical

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formulas, some music, and several other objects, they did not include a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. Every single novel is far too particular to be representative of the whole human race, but the paradox is that while every novel is too particular and even humble to stand as an emblem of humanity, the commonness of the novel is its most humane and human aspect. This is one of the effects of prose (one that Boccaccio pointed out in The Decameron when he was trying to justify its existence in 1350). People grow up narrating, expressing their points of view, elaborating and embroidering upon incidents, telling stories over and over. They do so because they want to fix events in their minds and remember them by endowing them with significance and discovering their meaning. It seems clear that many species of animals communicate vocally, but no other species of animal has been discovered to tell untrue stories. Untrue stories, as Proust realized, are worth telling only insofar as they remain distinct from true stories. It is this distinction that gives them completion. We can see this effect in both lies and gossip. Lies, of course, require some sort of logic for the liar to remember them and avoid being found out. The very process of working out a lie so it is plausible, though, is what makes it complete and implausible. Liars become smooth because they must—they are rhetoricians above all. Gossip, not a set of lies but a set of inferences, works the same way. A round of gossip always begins with a person everyone knows (a character) doing something interesting but uncharacteristic (shoplifting a blouse). The purpose of the gossip is to add events to the story as they become known (she gets caught, she cries, she is discovered to have another blouse in her purse, the police are called, she goes to the station, her dad calls the mayor, she gets off scot-free) and to account for the twists and turns in the story by means of psychology (that narcissistic bitch, remember when she took the lipstick out of my purse and wouldn't admit it even though I found it right in her locker?) and motive (she said if she didn't get that blouse somehow, her cousin would buy it, and she couldn't stand that), and then a broader interpretation of character (you know she always has thought her cousin was prettier than she is, and she hates her for that, but you'd never know it because she's so sweet whenever the cousin is around). Once the story is complete—when all the events are accounted for and the logic of the original mystery and its relationship to the character are understood— it becomes boring and the gossips go on to something else. It doesn't matter whether the story, the motives, and the interpretation of char-

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acter bear any relationship to reality (Do you remember when she stole that blouse? Well, it turned out the saleslady put it into her bag by mistake as she was leaving the store. She had paid for the other blouse anyway.); the compulsion of gossips is to fill in all of the details until the incident becomes a rounded whole. Everyone acknowledges that true stories can never be fully known— too many details lack corroboration, too many witnesses disagree about what really happened. Every true story is unsatisfying insofar as it is required to be true. But since the novel is required to be complete (its dispensation from truthfulness), its acknowledged untruthfulness removes it from the world of consequences. The reader suspending disbelief expects a novel to take place in a designated game area (inside a book) under rules that apply only to the game. The rules are agreed upon ahead of time (for example, that it is possible to experience a time and a place very different from one's own). However serious its subject matter, the reader suspends disbelief because a novel is a form of play. Suffering and brutality can begin and unfold without either the author or the reader lifting a finger to stop them. Horrors depicted graphically in a novel are considered to be far less disturbing than the same graphic horrors in a nonfiction account because they are being used in a different way, as part of the logical progress of a game rather than as an unwelcome or irrational intrusion upon life. And unbelievable happy events also can take place in a novel, as a way for the mind to play over and learn from what it might otherwise not have a chance to experience. The game quality of the novel gives it meaning and form, because all games begin, have a playing time, and end. It also gives the novel at least a rudimentary raison d'être, since games are a recognized form of learning for young mammals. The author sets up the game and is required to signal to the reader early in the narrative what the rules are. He does this in part by adopting a certain diction and tone right away—As I Lay Dying, for example, is a game about the lives of people who speak ungrammatically and are likely to do something unconventional; A Tale of Two Cities is a game in which two cultures are going to be contrasted, and the contrasts are going to be marked ones; A. S. Byatt's Possession is a game in which romantic relationships and styles of literature in two eras separated by 125 years are going to be compared and contrasted. A plot game, such as a murder mystery, signals the beginning of the plot right away with some sort of sinister event. A game about the workings of the mind puts off the beginning of

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the plot in favor of narrative ruminations about the nature of the world. A game about what seems versus what is, such as Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," begins immediately describing what seems to be happening—Gregor was transformed into a bug, and this is what his little legs waving in the air looked like to him. To be truly playful, a game requires voluntary participants—if the author does not construct a game that is interesting enough to participate in, the reader is perfectly free to walk away. If she stays to play, then the playful nature of the game frees her to do things she might not be free to do in life—to question, to contemplate, to fantasize, to experience intense emotions, and to feel no guilt about doing so. The participants in a game may learn something that they take away from the game, but they don't have to. This is part of the freedom of playing the game. The novel game, like the baseball game, is thus an exercise in freedom, agency, and choice. The author may attempt at every turn to imbue the reader with certain sympathies or to get the reader to believe in a certain chain of cause and effect, but the reader is always free to object or disagree, or, indeed, to correct the author's misconceptions, as authors of bad reviews frequently do. The gamelike nature of the novel is built on the literary convention of the conceit. The conceit is a form of metaphor or pretense—John Donne's poem "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" is full of conceits such as "Our two souls therefore, which are one,/Though I must go, endure not yet/ A breach, but an expansion,/Like gold to aery thinness beat"—in which the poet and the reader collaborate in a logical quest to understand the unique sort of love the poet and his wife share, using metaphors of quiet death, gold leaf, and compasses. The sensuous qualities of the images bolster the logic of the argument. In the same way, Trollope's novel The Eustace Diamonds proposes that the reader and the writer contemplate the character of Lizzie Eustace, whom they will agree to be a beautiful but shallow and ruthless young woman, who will begin the game's train of logical events by keeping for herself a string of valuable jewels that by rights belongs to the estate of a family she has married into. They will further agree that Lizzie has all sorts of relatives and associates who are implicated in her designs in some way or another, to see the effect of Lizzie's ambiguous moral choice upon the social world in which she lives. Lizzie's action works in the social body that she is part of like a radioactive isotope— as it moves around, it illuminates, sometimes in surprising ways, the moral life of the community. Trollope's conceit is that these characters

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and events are real, just as Donne's conceit is that love can be likened to death, gold, and a compass. The conceit of the poem succeeds if it promotes the logic of the poet's argument and if it is vivid enough for the reader to envision it. The conceit of the novel succeeds if the reader enjoys following it out. But both novelist and reader understand that it is all pretense. No diamonds have been stolen, no men have turned into bugs, no radio station broadcasting wholesome pap from downtown Minneapolis was ever started by a pair of brothers named Ray and Roy, no incognito crown prince has ever pulled a sword from an anvil resting on a stone, no fifteen-year-old French girl was ever subjected to year after year of relentless torture and attack and then killed by a lightning strike. But it is lots of fun to think that all of these things have happened, and more. As with all games, the novel game has many levels of play. The lowest level is, perhaps, simply following the sequence of the story and understanding what happens and why. Higher levels move toward greater and greater complexity and efficiency, just as professional basketball players execute more plays more quickly and more masterfully than high school basketball players do. A novel with a very high level of game quotient has more and more internal and external references, a denser and denser net of connections between words and of intuitive meanings, and the result is a higher level of abstraction. In a novel such as Ulysses or any one of a dozen other modern and postmodern novels, no character, no image, no incident stands alone—everything is part of a network of allusions that constantly offers various meanings and reinforces the playful nature of the novel as a form. This high level of play also shapes a novel's claims to verisimilitude, in fact making the question of verisimilitude part of the discussion of that particular novel. Novelists and readers, of course, take greater or lesser pleasure in the game potential of the novel as a form. To some readers, the various and shifting nature of Ulysses constitutes its greatest claim to verisimilitude; to others, the lack of an easily recognizable plot (which is always what makes a novel a public object rather than a private one) indicates self-indulgence on the part of the author. And as any game grows more complex, it becomes more abstract and exclusive—in order not to get lost in the subtleties of play, fans have to be highly versed in the rules and the moves of the game and willing to play the game (read the book) over and over to get everything out of it. The novelist has as many drafts as he wants to enhance the intricacies of the novel; likewise, the patient reader has as many rereadings as she

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wants to work out the intricacies the novelist has introduced. Obviously, the novel as a game gives itself over to all the tendencies of games to consume insiders and deflect outsiders. Highly referential and inaccessible novels with little plot and very complex characters need help to recommend themselves to normal readers, and so, for example, you can buy a twelve-cassette course of lectures on Ulysses that promises to get you through the book in a way that makes sense of it—and makes you want to read it. If you buy the lectures ($79), perhaps you will commit yourself to the project instead of wasting the money. The lectures and the book, it is implied, will have been worth the effort once the reader discovers the riches of the author's imagination, and in addition the reader will have gained the prestige of reading something great, famous, and obscure. Only a novel at the highest level of play with little evident suspense requires so much promotion by those who enjoy it. Jane Austen novels, for example, recommend themselves because they work perfectly well at lower levels of play (they seem true, funny, and suspenseful), even though there is more to be discovered as the reader grows more sophisticated. The fact remains, though, that the reader possesses the novel, and so if she finds that the residue of truth or insight remaining after the intricacies of an extremely sophisticated novel game have been worked out isn't really worth the effort, she is entitled to her opinion. So far we have talked about the psychology of the novel from the reader's point of view, but the novelist has a psychology, too. Once he has decided to write a novel, he goes through all the stages anyone else goes through who is attempting to learn a skill (see chapters 10 and 11). Just as the novel is read intuitively, it is composed intuitively. Many great authors give themselves over to the process of composition as to madness or vision—that is, they place the reasoning brain in service to the limbic brain, knowing that intuition is a faster, more efficient, but less knowable and controllable method of creation. The length of the novel requires the productive author to do this daily, often for years. An excellent example of this is an account by Charles Dickens's daughter Kate of an occasion from her childhood when she was ill, and spent the day in her father's study. He would sit at his desk writing, then jump up and go to a mirror, where he would make faces and talk quickly in various accents, then run back to his desk and write some more. He was acting out the drama and dialogue he was writing, with

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no sense, she thought, of where he was or of her presence in the room. Every novelist experiences a variant of this. Some theorists of creativity call it "flow." Robert Musil, in The Man without Qualities, characterizes it quite nicely as follows: "this non-plussed feeling refers to something that many people nowadays call intuition, whereas formerly it used to be called inspiration, and they think that they must see something suprapersonal in it; but it is only something nonpersonal, namely the affinity and kinship of the things themselves that meet inside one's head" (p. 129). He is overtly referring to a sense of synchronicity, but what he is describing is the feeling of writing a novel. "The things themselves" Musil alludes to are figures, words, images, and ideas given potency and importance by feelings such as indignation, pleasure, incongruity, sadness, fear, eagerness, and repulsion, and sensations such as coolness, smoothness, speediness, dullness, heat, abrasiveness, and warmth. All of these "things," which, of course, are not things at all but mental processes, come and go in the mind until something causes their connections to jell, and some set of them links up in a logic that is evident to the writer but as yet unexplored. The jelling catalyst might be any component of the novel. When I conceived A Thousand Acres, the ideas about Lear's daughters and about agriculture had been knocking around in my mind for fifteen years or so, but the exact moment they jelled was when I was driving down I-35 in northern Iowa in late March 1988. The landscape was flat and cold, lit by a weak winter sun, and as I stared out the window, the farm fields seemed enormous and isolated. As soon as I said, "This is where I could set that Lear book," the whole thing came into my mind, and the image of that bleak landscape remained throughout the writing of the book as a talisman to return to every time composition faltered. With Horse Heaven the situation was different—I conceived the book before I knew anything about the subject. A phrase I heard on the radio, "spit the bit," suggested to me that the language of horse racing must be wonderfully rich. As I began to learn about racing, each phrase or descriptor I then discovered added its own bit of inspiration to my original idea. In one case the catalyst was setting; in the other, the catalyst was language. Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names—he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones. Even though he was almost always writing to a schedule, he was careful to name his characters in ways that seemed to baptize them and begin their journey. Martin

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Chuzzlewit's plot didn't truly form around him when his name was "Chuzzlerigg." For Virginia Woolf, the history of Vita SackvilleWest's house caused the jelling of all sorts of thoughts about men, women, literary history, writing, nature, and love. For Harriet Beecher Stowe, the death of her own child from an illness sharpened her sense of the meaning of the slave trade, and she constructed her novel of slavery not first and foremost around the subjection of one man to another, but around women losing their children. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot when he was on a lengthy journey in Europe—homesickness sharpened his sense of what it would be like to return to Russia as a perfect innocent. Proust felt Swann's Way jell when he tasted a madeleine dipped in lime-flower tisane and was reminded of Sunday morning visits to his aunt when he was a child. As Musil suggests, this seems like an involuntary process, but I believe that is because it takes place in the same part of the brain where other things take place that seem involuntary, too, such as predilections, affinities, antipathies, a sense of Tightness, and other passions of all sorts. But it is not all clear sailing for the novelist once he has tasted the madeleine. The reasoning brain often responds to such an experience by saying no, bad job, not good enough, I don't think so, better not, too dangerous, who do you think you are?, and watch out. Practiced and prolific novelists have to be adept at short-circuiting the cautious and reasonable areas of the brain that get in the way of the process while making use of the logical faculties that organize, support, and oversee the composition of the story itself. Every novelist has to withdraw from a state of inspiration at least once in a while to work out the logical steps of plot, character, structure, theme, and style. The sense that an author has thought through the logics in the work is reassuring to the reader, who wants both sensation and perspective, preferably simultaneously. About three-quarters of the way through Halldôr Laxness's great epic of Icelandic rural life Independent People, for example, little Nonni, possibly Laxness's stand-in, is taken away from the impoverished family steading to America, where he is to learn a trade. The last person he says good-bye to is his grandmother, who bestows upon him her only two possessions—a kerchief and an ear pick—and gives him her only two pieces of advice: "I want to ask you never to be insolent to those who hold a lowly position in the world. And never to ill-treat any animal." Nonni is deeply affected by leaving home; the chapter is full of lyrical descriptions of the sound of the

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birds, the look of the family home, the sunlight. All of this is in some sense inspiration—the novelist surveying his homeland from the distance of many years. At the end of the chapter, though, the intelligence of the novelist enters twice—once in the voice of Asta Sollilja, Nonni's older sister, who says, "Say thank you to your grandmother, Nonni. She's given you the only thing she has." And then right away in his own voice as narrator, "And he put his hand in hers and thanked her in silence, for he knew no words that could express his gratitude for such a gift; she was giving him the nation's poorest Christmas to cheer him on his way when he went out into the world, and he knew that henceforth she would never celebrate Christmas" (p. 358). The scene, which is enormously poignant already, is made all the more so by Laxness's choice to underscore the humane and loving feelings he considers most important with a small authorial intrusion, which reflects upon not only general human conditions, but also, it is implied, what the adult Nonni learned from his humble origins. And so every novelist figures out a way to circumvent the judgmental, reasoning brain long enough to get the novel moving, but also, to use it to discern and clarify the meaning of the material. Every so often an author is so inspired that the whole brain works at a pitch of efficiency, discernment, and appropriateness that the author himself cannot understand. A novelist in the midst of inspiration does not feel the egotistical emotions—Aren't I great? Look at me!—but the selfless ones—Aren't I lucky? Isn't this interesting? Isn't this fun? This doesn't mean that the egotistical emotions don't intervene whenever they can, especially in relationship to other novelists. But the reader's exposure to the mind of the novelist is so prolonged that she can always tell by his tone when he is promoting himself in some small-minded way or when he is serving his characters, themes, and plot. All good novels, even those about how selfish the author is, what a jerk he has been, and what this says about all the other selfish jerks in the world, strive to attain the grandeur of inspiration over the pettiness of selfpromotion. If the novel is a therapeutic act, as suggested above, then the very form of the novel suggests a possible positive therapeutic outcome for the author first of all. The Hungarian theorist of the novel Gyôrgy Lukâcs pointed out that while from the moment the curtain goes up on the stage, a drama accelerates toward the climax, a novel begins from the first page to back away from the climax. The essence of the novel

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is retarded action rather than precipitate action. There are all sorts of methods for retarding the action of a novel, from digressions and detours, to the introduction of new characters, to plot twists and changes of scene. A compelling style itself retards the action by inviting the reader to linger over the words and sentences. Every time the action of a novel is retarded, choice enters, and so, every time, a character can choose again whether to pursue one course of action or another. One result of this retarded action is that the inevitability of tragedy is lost. If tragedy is the inability, in the end, to make connection, then the retarded action of the novel repeatedly raises the opportunity of making connection, and most characters, even in the most dismal novels, end up making some sort of connection. In Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Illych," the reader may think that at last a novelist is going to have the guts to fade to black. Ivan is dying. He has no relationship with anyone. His family life is entirely shallow and commodified. He is isolated by materialism and pride. Nevertheless, at the last moment, on the last page, when he feels that death is like being shoved into a dark sack, he notices that his son is sad at his passing, and the bottom of the dark sack gives way to light. A similar thing happens at the death of Gregor in "The Metamorphosis"—though Kafka was writing out of Jewish tradition (and Yiddish stories are often the darkest at the end), he still has Gregor sense the light of dawn just at his passing. Why is this? Can no novelist be relied upon to tell the unredeemed truth? In fact, hope exists in the form of narrative itself, because the narrator cannot stop talking. In the end is the word, and as long as the word exists, the possibility of connection exists, no matter how resolutely the author attempts to prove otherwise. Drama can be ended with an action or a curtain, but the novel must say good-bye, which means it lives on after the action is over. It is in the nature of the novel to say, "We are still alive." Furthermore, the requirement of the novel that the narrator be lucid enough to tell the tale puts a boundary on insanity and other forms of mental disconnection. No novel can weasel out of this hopefulness, because the act of observation removes one, at least temporarily, from the state of being overwhelmed or destroyed by circumstances. For real cataclysm you have to have drama or film. Sometimes the author himself is the first to react to the hope held out by the very nature of his novel. A character, even the protagonist, dies, but the author changes his life, as Tolstoy accepted Russian Orthodox religion at the end of writing Anna Karenina, as Dickens left

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his wife after writing David Copperfield, as Kafka laughed aloud while reading "The Metamorphosis" to his friend Max Brod. Does this mean that no character can have a tragic ending? Nineteenth-century novelists such as Eliot, Flaubert, and James were much interested in bringing the grandeur and artistic respectability of tragedy to the novel but, as I shall argue later, it turned out to be more difficult than they thought. For the novelist even more, perhaps, than for the reader, the novel is a game. He enters into a state of mind that is akin to the states of mind of players of other games, a state of flow or presence that feels playful to him even as he is writing of terrible horrors. The experience of composition, which is inherently joyful and detached, offsets the contemplation of horror. For some authors, the game aspect of novel-writing is the most inspiring, and the author becomes enamored of the tricks, puns, figures of speech, references to other works, abstract patterns, or insights from other endeavors he has used to structure his novel. In The Awkward Age, for example, Henry James tried an unusual playlike structure that contrasts with his more straightforwardly narrated novels such as The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors. The plot is simple: two young women need to be married off, but none of the eligible young men is quite suitable for reasons of either attractiveness or sensibility. The novel is divided into ten discrete parts, taking place as if on a stage among the same group of characters in a limited number of settings. Each section is told from a different point of view, and James suppresses his usual intrusive narrator's voice, telling the story mostly through action and dialogue. What James gets from this game is immediacy and intensity, and, as in a play, the efficient passage of time. He requires the reader to pay attention or get confused. Although James wrote The Awkward Age in the 1890s, before movies were invented, the novel anticipates movies such as the Japanese film Rashomon because it uses point of view rather like a camera to select features James wants to emphasize in the ongoing narrative in a way that would not be possible with a drama, and thereby reveal more about each character, perhaps, than would be possible with a more conventional narrator. By his own testimony, James was thrilled with his inventiveness in The Awkward Age, but it was and still is one of his more obscure novels because the form has an artificial quality that interferes with the reader's sympathetic identification with the characters. The author, like the reader, is given a social dispensation as part of

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his participation in the game—what his characters do is not held against him personally. Many authors make careers of depicting brutality, horror, cruelty, vice, and graphic violence; others make careers of depicting vast wealth and social status, perfect marriages, romantic fervor, and happy-ever-after endings. These writers are not required to be realists because they are not professing to play a realist game. Nor are they "writing what they know." No one expects Stephen King to have performed all the mayhem his characters perform, and they would in fact be shocked if he had. A novelist's life is allowed to be different from the games he plays. In fact, for novelists who write with particular skill about evil (Dickens, Bram Stoker, Stephen King), it is required to be different. The fact that a novel is a book also shapes its psychology in several ways. In the first place, the novel itself, the unfolding narrative, has no independent identity as an object, as other forms of art such as paintings, sculptures, and pieces of music do; nor can it be recited or performed from the stage—even when, as sometimes happens, a novel is commemorated by a full reading, as Ulysses was commemorated in Dublin on the hundredth anniversary of Bloomsday, no one expects listeners to sit quietly in a room listening attentively for the entire duration of the reading. If a novel finds no eager readers, it does not even exist. As a result, every novel has to be helped to find readers. A novel does not have the cachet of rarity—a novel from an edition that sells a thousand copies is not intrinsically more valuable than a novel from an edition that sells a million copies. When both editions first go on sale, they sell for the same twenty-five dollars. Because there are no one-of-a-kind novels, rarity and fashionability never combine to drive up the price of a book. In fact, the more fashionable a novel becomes, the more copies of it are printed, and the higher the residual profit for the author and the publisher—a novel is more like a tomato than it is like a diamond necklace. Every novel, no matter how abstract, wants to sell a million copies, and so every novelist has to offer some reason that his novel might appeal to lots and lots of readers. Like all purveyors of commodities as opposed to luxuries, novelists are usually perfectly willing to advertise (which is another reason the novel fits in with modern life). Jane Austen's novels were not published under her name, but as "written by a lady." This was not as bland then as it seems now—a lady was a specific being, genteel, wellbred, and respectable. In the disagreements of the period about

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whether young women should be allowed to read novels (rather than sermons), "by a lady" was like a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval— these novels were harmless (but, of course, they were not, because they gave voice to the aims and desires of young girls, as if those aims and desires were worth considering). Advertising for the novel, especially when done by the novelist himself or herself, is just like any other form of advertising—it doesn't hurt, and it can be educational; it may work, and it may not—but third-party endorsements and great word of mouth work better than anything else. In fact, though some novelists are more uncomfortable with it than others, the psychology of the novel must include some form of authorial self-justification. How else do ordinary citizens of the modern world justify drawing attention to themselves and their ideas for hours and hours on end? At the base of every novel, then, is an argument the author is making about why a novel is worth writing, selling, and reading. Defoe, who always demonstrates the way the novel fits into commercial culture, knew from his work writing criminal confessions that there was already a market for descriptions of crimes combined with acts of repentance. Harriet Beecher Stowe knew that the evils of slavery she was hearing about in Cincinnati from escaped slaves were unknown to many Americans. Louisa May Alcott knew that adolescent girls needed to realize that there were alternatives to the conventional idea of dependency and marriage current in her day. Rohinton Mistry knew that the lives of poor people in Bombay were almost unimaginable to middle- and upper-class citizens in India and elsewhere. Aphra Behn knew that her experience in South America was unique, and that she had seen things that other English men and women would never see. Zora Neale Hurston knew that the inner lives of poor black people were hidden from mainstream culture. When an author has the conviction that his novel is a timely social and historical document, it seems to justify itself and to carry the author along. To write about the inner life of a slacker, of someone whose claim to existence is only that his capacity for pleasure is vaster and more refined than anyone else's in the history of the world, might be harder to justify, but Marcel Proust manages to do it—not by asserting his importance but by demonstrating his talents. The opening section of Swann's Way, before the tasting of the madeleine, is about falling asleep, humankind's most routine and least regarded activity. As M. carries the reader through these ruminations, he demonstrates that the

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reader can trust him to deal with all the other more usual and more interesting things that civilized people do as well. To write about the inner life of a child-molester is even more unjustifiable, but in Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov has a conviction, too—the assertion of absolute artistic freedom by an author; the story justifies itself by means of the beauty and intricacy of the telling. And to tell the story of an ordinary family, as Anne Tyler does in Dinner at the Homesic\ Restaurant, may be the hardest of all to justify. The Tulls have no pretensions to distinction, other than the normal distinctions of ordinary life; they live at a certain address and have experienced certain events, that is all. Tyler is such a retiring and self-effacing writer that she makes no overt claims for her subject—like Proust, she relies on the telling itself to give it a reason. But in the end, the history of the novel is what justifies the story of the Tulls: the tales of all those other ordinary folks have given both writers and readers the conviction that everyday existence is something to be observed and learned from.

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ll novels, because they move repeatedly between action and reflection, are simultaneously about private experience and public events. For this reason, morality is a perennial gray area in the novel—characters are always doing things in private that challenge the reader's sense of what is appropriate. The Decameron and The Heptameron took up topics of sexuality and virtue that were natural to their simultaneously public and private "gossip" structure: ten friends sitting around telling compelling stories, and these topics remained perennial concerns of lengthy written prose narratives with protagonists. The ambiguous public/private nature of the novel makes it ideally suited to portray immoral acts, especially sexually explicit ones, and the history of the novel is marked by books that were burned and banned but gained immortality and widespread distribution anyway. The very fact that the novel exists in that gray area that is both public and private encourages both sides of any controversy over morality. To begin with, the author's sense of privacy while he is writing permits him to take up subjects and compose scenes he might hesitate to address in company. The book's subsequent entrance into the public arena is generally unaccompanied by the person of the author, but happens piecemeal. Gossip about the novel then builds its desirability. After the first copies are distributed, it is virtually impossible for any authorities to stop their spread, and if a controversy enters the public mind, the desirability of the novel grows—it becomes less like a tomato and more like a diamond necklace as threats to limit or stop its distribution seem about to be realized. The supporters of the novel then may act quite disingenuously sincere, and challenge the very idea that the novel has a public life, because it is always experienced in private and the decision to read such a novel is always an individual one. The usual defense of a controversial novel is that if people are / o 5

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offended, they don't have to read the book (and people who are offended often have not read the book, but are acting on rumor). Because of the practical impossibility of stopping the spread of banned novels, every controversy that becomes widespread reinforces the idea that the zone of the novel is a free zone, a play zone, a zone of privacy, and a zone where the individual's relationship to the group is under active contemplation—in other words, immoral novels reinforce the very idea of the novel, usually making a reader (like a protagonist) more determined to make up her own mind because it is both moral and identity-confirming to do so. One of the first banned novels was the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, which was published during the reign of the very controlling and conservative Philip II of Spain, who is also notorious for the Spanish Inquisition and the Spanish Armada. Lazarillo is a child narrator, who happens to observe the hypocrisy, brutality, and lechery of the adults in authority around him. Philip's efforts to ban the novel were absolutely unavailing. It went through many editions and spawned the coarse and comic genre of the picaresque, but the story does not follow Lazarillo as he goes upon a journey—in fact, much of the action is domestic. Lazarillo reports that the priest he serves hoards the bread and the nobleman he is later employed by absconds without paying his rent. Lazarillo's main freedom seems to be expressing an independent opinion about people he should pay respect to. Lazarillo de Tormes demonstrates what should be evident, and is in part the subject of The Decameron and The Heptameron—respectable people often have embarrassing secrets. It is not a very subtle or ambitious work—but its importance was enhanced by the fact of banning. Every banned novel makes the world in which it is banned more and more like itself—a place where individuals have inner lives that they protect and points of view that they value; a place where people of like minds connect through reading the novel, even when it is difficult to do so; a place where prohibited types of connections, often sexual ones, are actively pursued as gestures of resistance, where pressure from the outside reinforces the zone of privacy; and where moral rules are seen to be questions of taste, mores, and custom. Early novels wrestled with these issues over and over, and their authors had to commit themselves to one side or the other. Though Cervantes seems to have been familiar with and influenced by Lazarillo de Tormes, and certainly The Heptameron, he decided that sexuality and manly virtue could not be reconciled. It is no coincidence that

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Quixote and Sancho leave Quixote's estate and pass most of the plot in the out-of-doors, a public world, where they are subject to the observation and opinions of a multitude of other characters. Part of the comedy of the plot is that Quixote has been misled by the romances he loves to read, and at one point his housekeeper and his servants decide to wall up his library so that not only can he not get at it, he is also supposed to wonder whether it ever existed. Books—romances, in fact, about love—are dangerous. Is Cervantes agreeing with this idea or making fun of it? At this point it is impossible to say, but the effect of Don Quixote on the subsequent history of the novel was to shift respectability away from depictions of sex, even as a component of love (private drama), and toward depictions of violence (public drama). Nevertheless, throughout the eighteenth century, issues of sexuality were the ones that powered the rise of the novel, and authors tried various methods to put them over, including anonymity (Defoe); wit (Fielding); endless, and perhaps numbing, detail (Richardson); a cautionary tone (Susanna Rowson in Charlotte Temple, the best-selling novel in the United States at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth); and sheer brazen excess (de Sade). On the surface, it may be that the subject of romance seemed simple as well as appealing to eighteenth-century authors—what could be easier than to bring the attractive young woman and the manly fellow to the altar after a few exciting adventures? It is the standard plot of a multitude of plays. But in fact, the use of actors and the public nature of the stage circumscribed what the authors could portray (as did, of course, laws against lasciviousness and public nakedness). As soon as a character is alone in her chamber, though, writing a letter, like Pamela, or hiding out, like Roxana, the pressure on propriety intensifies. The character may set out only to report his or her adventures, but because the novel always moves between action and reflection, soon enough he or she is bringing to bear his or her intentions, desires, regrets, fears, self-justifications, and other, more secret thoughts. If the character tries to merely report actions, they quickly become confusing because without feelings, actions don't carry enough emotional weight to remain clear in the reader's mind. But as soon as the character begins to develop a rationale for his or her actions, the narrative moves toward a confession. And what good is a confession if the character has nothing to confess—that is, no moral dilemma, no temptation to be delivered from? Without drama, a novel ceases to be entertaining and therefore loses its reason to exist.

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In addition, of course, eighteenth-century novelists, like novelists before and after them, were eager to depict the world they lived in, and in the world they lived in seduction, sexual prédation, rape, sexual slavery, marriages of convenience, marriages based solely on property considerations, prostitution, child abandonment, the sale of children into servitude of all kinds, and, of course, disease, suffering, and early death were commonplace. To raise the simple moral issue of whether a girl should be allowed to fall in love with the man of her own choice or be required to marry the man of her parents' choice was to enter into a train of logic that could lead to all sorts of much more complex and difficult moral questions. One way to deal with these issues was to address their moral content directly, which is what Voltaire does in Candide (1759) when he has Dr. Pangloss propose that "everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds." Candide himself, his beloved Cunegonde, and Dr. Pangloss then set out upon a whirlwind tour of the known world to test this hypothesis. The answer they come up with is considerably different and more brutal than the answer Quixote comes up with. Whereas Quixote is beaten from time to time, and tricked, and disillusioned, Candide finds wars, famines, epidemics, slavery, gratuitous brutality, and destruction of every kind—political, personal, environmental, social. No person and no place (except for El Dorado, far from Europe, entirely surrounded by impassable mountains, and rich beyond compare) is immune from the wholesale Hobbesian conflict of all against all, and no character, even the beautiful Cunegonde, is safe from the effects of the world. Evil is everywhere. Candide succeeds as a polemic, but it doesn't succeed as a novel, precisely because Voltaire sets out his program too clearly and hardly bothers with his novelistic duties of character and plot development. Surprisingly, it is the disreputable Justine, by the disreputable marquis de Sade, that makes the point Voltaire hoped to make with the impact Voltaire intended. Justine was published in 1791, during the French Revolution, and the novel's theme, you might say, is the right of every man of rank to do whatever he wants with any woman he can gain access to, preferably by force. The catalog of brutalized and exploited women in Justine runs the gamut from legitimately married wives and daughters of great families to nameless girls from the streets and includes examples of every rank and type in between. According to de Sade, being sold into marriage is the least of it. Women are also sold into slavery, thievery, and prostitution; they are turned over by their guardians to tortur-

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ers and necrophiliacs if their guardians themselves don't care to torture and rape them. Young girls are routinely betrayed by both women and men, by those who like them and by those who hate them. The only true and lasting motives of anyone in de Sade's world are greed first and lust second (those who are less lusty gain more profit), though expounding various theories is also a pastime of libertines of every class. It is the explosion of theory that differentiates de Sade from Marguerite de Navarre's Hircan. For Hircan, the right to exploit women is a matter of honor—it bolsters the God-given social order. For a woman to rebel against it is a form of treason, or even blasphemy. In Justine, the goal is not to reinforce the social order but to maximize the exploitation of female flesh. If the women rebel or object, so much the better in terms of excitement, because the more desirable goal for the sadist is to inflict punishment since, as one of the men Justine meets early in the novel tells her, regular sex with women is boring and also damages the monetary value of the woman in question, especially if she is young and can be sold into marriage for a large sum. What real men really want is to be buggered by their servants. When the men and women Justine meets on her journey around France are not violating her, they are trying to convince her that even if what they are doing to her is not right according to conventional morality, then at least it's natural and inevitable. Many of the sexual scenes are shockingly graphic, but many are politically shocking, too. At one point Justine is standing in the shade of a tree, and she sees a large, wealthy, and scenic monastery in the valley below her. She goes there for refuge and is taken into a torture ring run by powerful monks and church elders, who not only cruelly exploit and torture succeeding populations of girls and women, but also murder them for pleasure and dispose of the bodies on the grounds of the monastery. She and another girl attempt to escape; she succeeds, the other girl doesn't. Justine's journey shows her the secret life of all of France— every château, every wood, every house in town, every church, every seat of secular or religious power hides one or more libertines, who constitute a vast, informal conspiracy, or, you might say, a vast, corrupt governing class unfettered by law or morality. I don't think a modern reader can read Justine, even in the context of other eighteenth-century novels, without wondering if even a portion of what de Sade portrayed was true, or if it was all a projection on his part. It seems obvious that de Sade wrote Justine for pornographic reasons—that is, the plot and the protagonist are there to serve the

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author's and the reader's shared desire to fetishize sex and cruelty and to use images for lascivious excitement. De Sade himself asserted that Justine was "capable of corrupting the devil" (possibly an example of authorial wishful thinking). Even so, while most eighteenth-century novels that portray rape, intended rape, or rape through false marriage more or less treat the issue as a personal one—a particular man attempting the virtue of a particular woman (only Defoe has a larger view of the structural disadvantages of womanhood), de Sade makes rape part of the apparatus of state control as expressed by individual members of the ruling class (most of whom possess formal authority; they are not renegades or rogues). He is also the only one who asserts that there is no virtue anywhere in the society—no one person who is not lustful, greedy, ready to kill for the slightest advantage. How does the author really feel about this state of affairs? On the one hand, various mouthpieces for his views make the case that nature is red in tooth and claw, so such cruel relations between people are natural and not to be resisted or regretted. On the other hand, he allows Justine to be unconvinced. In the end she wins, insofar as she is able; she never gives up her attachment to autonomy, and she is spared further suffering through sudden death. Justine is a true heroine; she never betrays herself, always tries to understand and survive, never loses her moral compass. Surely she speaks for the author as much as the men do. Perhaps the political cast of Justine is accidental to the simple requirement of a novel to have a protagonist. If de Sade's purpose is to portray a world of tortures and temptations merely as a pornographic catalog, then Justine makes a good protagonist—in part a tour guide to this world, in part a foil for it—by striving for virtue. She does what protagonists do, for while it cannot be said that she is transformed by her journey, she is revealed as even more resolute than she appeared to be at the beginning. Perhaps de Sade is simply creating a logical scheme upon which he can hang his inhumane fantasies, but he does give Justine an articulate point of view. Though for the purposes of the plot, she must go on in a way that becomes almost purely existential, since she loses everything but her dignity and her identity and never has reason to hope for anything better than more torture, and is never convinced by the evidence of her own senses or by the arguments of the parade of libertines, she knows what she wants, and she continues to want it. However many times she is violated physically, she is never violated psychologically—she is as virtuous as Pamela at the end. And

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the reader never betrays Justine, either, by sympathizing with her exploiters, no matter how eloquent they are in their arguments. When at the end she opens a window and is struck by lightning, de Sade's ploy to get himself out of the novel has the effect of an apotheosis—the singularity of Justine's death suits her singular ability to endure and becomes a type of anointing. Justine shows that whatever an author's motives for depicting horror, the form of the novel itself molds the depiction. Ostensibly shocking and immoral, Justine actually promotes a certain moral point of view—that integrity and virtue can be retained and recognized in the face of relentless suffering. In addition, to expose secret corruption is to challenge its existence because of the nature of the novel as a common and available commodity. The degree to which we comfortably read novels that were once banned, proscribed, or denounced is the degree to which we are trained by the novel to accept the ambiguous public/private nature of novels as a whole. If the private side of the novel promotes depictions of sex, then the public side promotes depictions of violence, which we also read in private. Because all lengthy written prose narratives with protagonists concern tension or conflict between the protagonist and the group, the moral implications of social conflict have always been a subject of the novel. One way of noting how this works is to look at the Icelandic sagas, which seem to have been invented entirely to explore this issue. Violence is as tempting to the writer, of course, as sex, because it raises the stakes of the plot to a high and dramatic level, which is enhanced further by the facility with which the author can move between the blows delivered and the thoughts of those delivering them. Scenes of violence in a novel, for example, don't have to be burdened by exclamations and asides, like sword fights on the stage; the reader gets the dual suspense of the progress of the fight combined with the hidden and usually different progress in the intentions and reactions of the fighters. As with sexual issues, though, the author always finds himself wrestling with extra moral questions that an apparently simple fight poses. A saga begins with a misfit who gets into a conflict with those around him. He may be a fairly decent or respected man whose conflict is almost accidental, such as Gisli, in Gislasaga, or he might be a naturally aggressive and pugnacious individual, such as Egil, in Egilssaga, but he always has some quality that sets him apart to begin with

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(women characters may have these qualities also). In the course of the narrative, a combination of personality and circumstances or luck or fate expands the conflict until it becomes an unresolvable feud. At each stage of the rising action, men of importance attempt to resolve the issues by assigning blame and penalties of outlawry or forfeiture of property or money, and, at every stage of the conflict, some example of graphic violence is included in the narrative—heads are hacked off, men are cut in two from neck to crotch, a man continues to fight while holding his intestines together with his shirt, a family is burned alive in their house. In some cases, as with Gisli and Egil, the misfit is simply too strong a personality to accept his punishment. In other cases, as in Njalssaga, the two sides continue to inflame the situation by provoking one another in spite of the penalties. As the conflict spreads through the district—or, indeed, the whole country—the violence gets more graphic. The saga ends either when the misfit is killed, as with Gisli, or when the group can no longer tolerate the violence the feud has sparked, as in Njalssaga. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Iceland were marked by violence and lawlessness all over the island. The probable author of Egilssaga, Snorri Sturluson, was himself killed by political rivals. The situation became so desperate in the middle of the fourteenth century that the Icelanders gave up their independence and asked the Norwegian king to resume control of the island (control of Iceland from Europe continued then for six hundred years, until after the Second World War, when the Danes, who succeeded the Norwegians, gave Iceland independence). The history of the sagas shows that Icelanders of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries wrestled constantly with the nature of social unrest, sometimes locating its origin in personalities, sometimes in circumstances, but testifying always to its ubiquity. In every saga, ever-present weapons and volatile personalities combine to injure the group. But the sagas also show that freedom and intransigence have an appeal—the saga authors can't help admiring the strength of such personalities as Egil, who is not attractive in any way, being churlish, beetle-browed, and short-tempered. He represents some essential Icelandic quality of irreducible independence opposed to the effete courtiers of the Norwegian king. Even so, while the sagas were deeply indebted to the epic tradition and existed side by side with Icelandic epic poems, they were closer to novels than epics. The essential purpose of sagas was not to glorify the regrettable necessity of slaughter—gods like Zeus and Krishna do not enter into the action

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and try to influence or advise the characters—but to measure the social costs of individualism and its corollary, freedom. After the Icelanders turned over their government to the king of Norway, the saga, one of the greatest forms of literature in the history of civilization, went out of fashion, replaced by tales and poems that are more like folklore than novels. Without the social struggles that marked the saga era, and the dilemmas of freedom that are so like those that Europeans and their descendants have faced in the past three hundred years, the Icelandic form of the lengthy written prose narrative with a protagonist had no reason to exist. Novelists gradually became more adept at analyzing what has turned out to be one of the novel's most fertile subjects, the morality of personal relationships, which seems, on the surface, to avoid both the pitfalls of sex and the pitfalls of violence. Perhaps the works of Jane Austen are our paradigm. Her six novels are deemed entirely safe for consumption by the most innocent of readers; "evil" hardly enters her world, except in the form of insensitivity or rudeness. Of course, the smooth acceptability of Austen's work turns out to be an illusion— underneath her proper sentiments and her perfectly modulated tone of ironic reserve there is a sharp, irreverent, and even revolutionary spirit. But in her explorations of personal relationships, she showed that it was possible to write serious, astute, and sophisticated "domestic" novels, and these sorts of novels, largely avoiding both sex and violence, became the staple of the nineteenth century. Even in these novels, though, potential moral issues abound, along with the power to shock the reader, and far more shockingly cruel, in its way, than Justine is that staple of middle school, Wuthering Heights. No one has ever considered Wuthering Heights to be unsuitable for young girls; most women read it for the first time when they are thirteen or fourteen. There are no sex scenes in Wuthering Heights, and many readers doubt whether the lovers, Cathy and Heathcliff, ever have sex. She is a young girl when he runs away; there is no suggestion that she has been unchaste. She is a married woman when he returns; there is no suggestion that she betrays her husband. Whether Heathcliff has ever made love to another woman by the time he returns is moot—he is obsessed with Cathy and appears to have thought of nothing else in his time away. No doubt part of the reason girls love Wuthering Heights is that it may (only the author knows for sure) portray the most passionate love as asexual and entirely spiritualized,

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rather like standing on a high promontory and feeling the wind blowing off the moors. At the same time, there are no beatings or shootings in Wuthering Heights. The only blood shed is by a ghost in a dream. Nevertheless, the theme of Wuthering Heights is that any betrayal, any cruelty, any indifference to others, including spouses and children, is, if not justifiable, then understandable, in the context of sufficient passion. A woman who returns to Wuthering Heights as an adult most likely feels more uncomfortable with Heathcliff, in particular, than she did as a girl. For one thing, and this is not unimportant, Heathcliff is rude by choice. Since charm is one of the qualities that keeps readers reading, Heathcliff's rudeness has to be compensated for, and it never is. For another, Heathcliff is wantonly cruel to young Catherine and Hareton (whom he has betrayed as a father figure by failing to educate him in any way), because he means to avenge himself upon their dead parents through them, moment by moment and day by day. He oppresses, neglects, and abuses them because they are who they are. In other words, his only redeeming quality grows increasingly abstract as the novel progresses, and he doesn't develop any new ones. The Heathcliff of the novel is not played by Laurence Olivier. He is played by your scary Uncle Hugo, who never liked you for a moment. None of the characters of Wuthering Heights is a model of goodness, and all of their crimes are interpersonal ones. The older Cathy is capricious and selfish; her daughter is cross and petty (though kind, in the end, to Hareton). Hindley is a mean drunk, Edgar is long-suffering but weak, and Edgar's sister is spoiled and impetuous. Young Linton is, as Heathcliff truthfully observes, the worst of the bunch, though that amounts only to being whiny, imperious, and irritating. That nearly everyone comes to a bad end is not the satisfaction that it might be, though, because the reader's experience of the general bad nature of the whole crew is prolonged. Do the characters of Wuthering Heights perpetrate even a grain of the harm that the characters of Justine do? No. Does Wuthering Heights seem in the end to be a nastier novel than Justine does? Yes. They are similar in that both are unrelieved and both have endings that are happy relative to the rest of the novel. But it is more disheartening to read about Heathcliff's domestic sins than it is to see the crimes of the ruling class exposed, because the exposure of political crimes seems like a step toward ameliorating them, while Heathcliff's cruelties are specifically directed at those he should be nurturing, and only chance intervenes between him and his victims—

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exposure only reminds us of how pervasive domestic abuse is. The paradox is that novelists ended up exploring the rich subject of the morality of interpersonal relationships only to discover that while, on the one hand, this subject was safe from the dangers of sex and violence, on the other hand, achieving in such plots the satisfying feeling of redress is difficult if not impossible. One of the particular vocations of the novel from the beginning has been the portrayal of brutes, criminals, and psychopaths. The first story of The Decameron takes as its protagonist the wickedest man in the world, who likes to lie and steal, who is sexually deviant, who even lies when he is giving his last confession. What we know about his crimes, though, is narrated, because every time he speaks, he lies. The reader accepts him as the paradigm of evil because the other characters of the tale report that he is and Boccaccio's cast of listeners accept their judgment. The story works only if his evil nature is a premise rather than subject to discussion or proof. Boccaccio gives this tale a lot of space, but he doesn't develop his evil character's state of mind in any way. The evil characters in The Heptameron are presented in a similarly cut-and-dried way, but Marguerite and her fellow critics speculate about the motives of some of the more egregious perpetrators more than Boccaccio's listeners do. Most eighteenth-century novelists were much interested in motives and rationales for evil actions (Henry Fielding, for example, who seems ebullient and earthy in Tom Jones, explored darker themes in Jonathan Wild and Amelia), and eighteenthcentury novels are full of immorality and crime (perhaps the lengthiest depiction of the mind of a heartless seducer is Lovelace, in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa). Eighteenth-century libertines and murderers want to communicate. Authors couch their characters' self-revelations as confessions, letters, diaries, and testaments (for example, the memoir of James Hogg's "Justified Sinner"). Even in the Romantic period, as with Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time and Julien Sorel in The Red and the BlacJ^, the psychopath readily enters into the world of communication. All the way up through the beginning of the nineteenth century, evil was viewed by novelists (as well as other writers and thinkers) as a constant of human nature. A typical example of how evil was depicted is to be found in the work of Sir Walter Scott, not much read now but wildly popular in its own day. Scott's novels regularly took up large

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social issues. In several novels, he concerned himself with the Scottish religious wars of the seventeenth century, which were bitterly contested ideological conflicts with lingering doctrinal, social, and political ramifications. In Scott's novels, villainy (opportunism, rudeness, snobbishness, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, willingness to do violence) occurs randomly, and membership in certain groups does not automatically translate into venality—some clergymen are decent, others are fanatical; some aristocrats are kind, others are brutal; some ideologues are honorable, others are self-serving. Scott subtly shows how, in times of ideological ferment, virtuous acts and evil acts grow out of the shifting combination in every individual of temperament, circumstances, beliefs, and desires. Events and character interact in a classically tragic way—outcomes have a fated quality. The painful effect of dramatic irony is muted by distance from the period of the narrative—Scott is careful to include images of the peaceful graves of his characters that remind the reader that the passions that motivated the conflicts have vanished as thoroughly as the conflicts themselves— and there is no sense that things could have turned out, or could turn out, differently. Even in a novel as passionately dramatic as Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor, in which, as a result of being forced to marry against her will, a young girl kills her new husband and then herself goes mad, a sense of peace and resignation result from the traditional idea that the combination of character and circumstances will always result in what we realize in retrospect was inevitable. One of Scott's innovations, artistically, was to take traditional tragic patterns and apply them, not just to kings and princes, but also to a whole society of characters, high and low, male and female, victorious or defeated. Another was to pay close attention, even in the context of the Gothicseeming plot The Bride of Lammermoor, to the intricacies of psychological and sociological cause and effect. Gothic tales such as The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe, were all the rage in Scott's day, and he puts plenty of uncanny incidents into his novel, which is set in a gloomy castle in the Highlands where superstitions are the norm, but he links his heroine's fate not to these, but to the stress of her difficult position as a pawn in her mother's quest for power, and the effects upon her own sensitive and uncomprehending nature of the conflicting strong personalities around her. Mysterious events, such as the ominous disappearance of a portrait, have an effect, but only heighten the sense of fear and anxiety already created by concrete conflicts and events. Scott's ability to lucidly synthesize threads of cause and effect

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much inspired Charles Dickens, who read his works avidly as a young man, but Dickens wasn't interested in the past. He was interested in the present. In the nineteenth century the theory of evil changed, which changed the nature of morality in the novel, and therefore the portrayal of brutes, criminals, and psychopaths. What was really at the heart of the nature of good and evil, novelists realized, was secrecy and, indeed, silence. It seems that Charles Dickens, the most influential English author of the nineteenth century, was genuinely drawn to criminals and psychopaths. From the time of Oliver Twist (written when Dickens was in his midtwenties), all the way until the end of his career, he excelled at depicting nasty brutes: Sikes, who beats his girlfriend to death in a rage (Oliver Twist); Quilp, a choleric, garrulous thief and bully (The Old Curiosity Shop); Murdstone, a cold and socially respected tyrant (David Copperfield); and Carker, the smiling and Iago-like betrayer (Dotnbey and Son). Every Dickens novel has a different variety—sometimes lascivious, sometimes greedy, sometimes power-mad, sometimes vengeful (Madame Defarge), sometimes merely small and mean (Uriah Heep), but always richly, and even gleefully, realized. Dickens was superbly inventive, but never more so than in his exploration of the psychology of evil. What is important, technically, is that, with each new novel, his way of portraying his perpetrators becomes less and less dramatic and more and more internal. Sikes vents his inner rage when he beats Nancy. He is eloquent as well as cruel, and that's all we need to know about him. Ten years later, in Dotnbey and Son, Dickens portrays Carker the Manager, who plans to steal both Dombey's wife and his fortune. The way in which Dickens's prose slips easily into Carker's mind, revealing to the reader his secret thoughts and plans, especially how the world appears and feels to him, is so effortless that it doesn't seem like anything new, but it is. Carker's inner life is known only to him and to the reader, and his schemes excel in seductive psychological plausibility, drawing the reader into their logic as if Carker were the protagonist, not the villain. The growing internalization of the psychology of all of his characters was a feature of Dickens's work as he matured—in Dotnbey and Son, for example, his characters convincingly and movingly coexist inside the novel, physically together but cut off from one another by differing and often mutually exclusive perceptions of the world that are overcome only through enormous effort. Such insights into the nature of human isolation and subjectivity

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constitute a large part of Dickens's gift to his readers, but the application of this idea and of Dickens's gift for empathy with sociopathic personalities constitutes a philosophy that has had enormous effect on how modern people understand evil as a form of logic, and even of madness that is internally consistent, unrecognized as evil by the perpetrator, and compelling. By the end of his career, Dickens was as good as anyone who has ever lived at clarifying the motivations of those who harm others. To each novelistic psychopath of the Dickensian sort, his crimes make perfect sense, and as the reader comes to understand the logic, she is tempted to understand the sense, to become, in some way, less horrified at what has been done and more accepting of violent personalities in general. One effect of this technique is that old questions of sin, evil, and transgression of social norms become, with empathy (which is, remember, not "feeling with" but "perceiving with"), new questions of sanity and mental illness. When the novelist makes the reader understand a logic based on horrific premises, is the malefactor distanced from his humanity, or is humanity enlarged to encompass his logical facility? The novel explores this question repeatedly and offers no convincing conclusion. At the same time, like Scott, Dickens explored cause and effect— what has made Ralph Nickleby, Scrooge, Jasper, and Headstone the way they are? Some of his explanations are more convincing than others. For example, John Jasper, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, smokes opium, which may explain the extreme degree of his calculating isolation; Scrooge not only has had an impoverished childhood, but also went into business with a partner who encouraged his miserly proclivities. In his most insightful portrayal, that of Bradley Headstone, the stalker in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens shows how Bradley's shame at his class origins has combined with his temperamental proclivities (envy and self-repression) to engender an uncontrollable murderous paranoia and obsession. Even when Dickens's specific psychological theories don't hold water, the idea of cause and effect, the idea that there can be a theory of evil (and goodness), does. As early as Oliver Twist, Dickens is laying out a how-to manual for making criminals—first you deny them porridge and all sense of self-respect, then you give them criminal associates and teach them a few skills, such as picking pockets and engaging in prostitution. It is a very short step from this sort of causal logic to the advocacy of political and social

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solutions for what had always been considered individual moral failings, and Dickens readily made it. But the novel that had the most sensational effect on the moral life of its times was Uncle Tom's Cabin, the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century in the United States, and a big seller in England and in Europe, too (both Dickens and Tolstoy read it). Stowe began with a polemical purpose—to promote the abolition of slavery by disseminating stories of life on southern plantations that she heard from escapees passing through Cincinnati (where she lived) on the Underground Railroad. She couched her argument in starkly moral terms, invoking Christian principles and ideals as a matter of course, and depicting fairly openly for the period both the physical violence and the sexual license that slavery produced. Stowe, who lost a young child to illness, was especially moved by the plight of mothers and children who were separated by traffic in slaves and as a result of slave-breeding establishments—two of her most memorable characters are Cassy, whose children have been sold away from her, and Topsy, bred in a slave-breeding establishment and allowed to grow up without any nurture whatsoever. But the main protagonist and antagonist are Tom and Simon Legree, who represent good and evil, respectively. What distinguishes them from characters of melodrama (at least in the novel, which engendered any number of stage melodramas throughout the nineteenth century) is Stowe's analysis of, on the one hand, Tom's choices in the course of his martyrdom, and on the other, Legree's origins, motives, and psychology. Tom makes virtuous choices for logical and believable reasons. At the beginning, he allows himself to be sold south because he knows enough to fear that if the plantation he lives on goes bankrupt, his whole family is in jeopardy. Once in New Orleans, he continues to hope that his kindly but feckless master will free him, as he promises. Once on Legree's plantation, Tom knows that he is so lost in the bayous of southern Louisiana that escape is a long shot, and though a slave rebellion is conceivable, a positive outcome is not likely. In addition, Tom is a man of faith who truly believes that this world is passing, and his real home is with his Savior—why jeopardize his salvation when very little good is likely to come of it? Legree has no faith but is supremely superstitious. A hard and greedy northerner originally, he has no personal or spiritual resources, no friends, and no sense of order or aesthetic pleasure. His only recreation is drinking, but drinking renders him violent and paranoid. At

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no point does Stowe cause the reader to feel sympathy for Legree, but she does provide a believable analysis for his absolute lack of fellow feeling not only toward his slaves but also toward everyone else, and she links this analysis to her analysis of slavery in the United States— the southerners may own the slaves, but northern banks provide the money, earn much of the profit, and turn a blind eye to the injustice of the system. Stowe's ideas were not original, but the sharp delineation of character required by a novel as opposed to a sermon or an essay aided Stowe's moral crusade because she was able to systematically set up and demolish every argument for slavery by inserting into the reader's head vivid, dramatic set pieces that engaged the reader's emotions while undercutting each proslavery rationale. Uncle Tom's Cabin brilliantly employs the natural rhetorical tools of the novel form. It eavesdrops on the private conversations of black characters, and lo and behold, they are intelligent, brave, virtuous, funny, charming—in short, they irradicably demonstrate that slaves are human. It promotes freedom by vividly depicting tyranny. It puts characters such as Miss Ophelia (from New England) and Augustine St. Claire (from New Orleans) in situations where they have to discuss their options and make choices, and because they are sympathetic characters, the reader wants them to make sympathetic choices. As Tom travels from his natal plantation in Kentucky down the river to New Orleans and then into the swamps of Louisiana, he is repeatedly discussed, by slave owners and slave dealers and other slaves—his journey toward martyrdom is Stowe's beautifully disguised catalog of arguments for and against slavery. In the early 1850s, when she was writing, catalogs of arguments for and against slavery were rife, but only the novel form, and Stowe's adept handling of it, could change the terms of the discussion and renew the issues in a way that galvanized millions of people and caused President Lincoln to greet her, some years later, with the remark "So this is the little lady who made this big war." Repeatedly, in Uncle Toms Cabin, Stowe asks the reader to consider and decide the larger and smaller emotional and moral questions of slavery. In the many months that the novel ran serially in the National Era, Stowe gave her readers steady practice in deciding against slavery, and in understanding causal relationships between the system of slavery and its moral effects. What nineteenth-century novelists discovered was that the exploration of cause and effect that is natural to the novel mitigates the idea

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that evil is random, and that the requirement of the novel form that the protagonist be in a continuously depicted relationship with his society has the effect of placing responsibility. As soon as responsibility is apportioned, both author and reader start to feel that evil can be fixed, and fixed by amateurs, since the novel is always an amateur production. The effect of novels by Dickens, Stowe, and their contemporaries (which were, in some sense, the cultural phenomena of their day similar to Star Wars or Sex and the City in our day) was to make morality a political question—a discussion of good and bad individual actions and their effects, as always, but also of wealth, power, and influence. The novel has certain inherent characteristics—it is naturally democratic; it promotes individuality and freedom; it is intimate and sociable and connective; it elevates inner life over appearance; it is, often in spite of itself, hopeful; and it is naturally popular. These qualities fit into and exemplify the idea of the modern liberal society and in the course of the nineteenth century came to be seen as moral issues (though they can as easily contradict another sort of society's system of morality as uphold it). The great conflict of the twentieth century concerned whether morality was made up of a set of personal choices having to do with right and wrong behavior, as described by, say, the Ten Commandments, or whether it was made up of a set of political choices having to do with the inequitable distribution and abuse of power and wealth. All sorts of social and economic institutions that had once been considered more or less the natural order of things became moral dilemmas (and zones of ideological conflict)—slavery, marriage and domestic abuse, child labor, the rewards of capital versus the rewards of labor, genocide in war or as an act of conquest, exploitation and destruction of natural resources, the impoverishment of the human spirit as an effect of labyrinthine and secretive bureaucracy. The novel promoted this moral shift. The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance, and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive. All through the nineteenth century, novelists explored and exposed social abuses, thereby constantly forcing the moral and the political, the personal and the public, to interpenetrate. Dickens and Stowe had

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plenty of company—Eliot, Dostoevsky, Hawthorne, Tolstoy, Balzac, Zola, and countless others. Machiavelli would have been appalled. But Machiavelli did not have to contend with a citizenry that was entertaining itself on long train journeys with novels—that is, with routine contemplation of political and moral questions about social and economic arrangements. If reading a novel is an act that underscores the reader's feelings of agency in a way that audience-based forms of art do not have to, and if novel-readers have no other experience of choice, just this one may indeed politicize them. The novel always promotes moral questions as capable of being understood and decided by individuals. This is part and parcel of the novel's natural allegiance to the notion that things are not as they appear. If things are not as they appear, then the individual (author or character or reader) is required to divine how they really are and to understand the contrast between how they appear to others and how they appear to him. But the protagonist, as he comes to understand the difference between reality and appearance, also is required to sacrifice something. Typically, the equation works as follows: If he sacrifices his own sense of truth, then he is dishonored. If he sacrifices love, life, wealth, position, or any other commonly accepted good in favor of his own sense of truth, then he is damaged or destroyed but not dishonored. If he can mesh inner truth and outer truth with only the sacrifice of illusions or foolish expectations, then he is a character in a comic novel. But in any case, the novel is absolutely wedded to point of view and therefore must train its readers to see that things are not as they appear even if, perhaps, they are; it also trains its readers to make the honorable choice—that is, one's own truth over accepted truths. Nineteenth-century novelists explored all sorts of moral and political ideas, but the one they kept returning to, the one most central to the novel, was the question of female virtue, which is simultaneously the most apparently personal, the most socially and politically explosive, and the most inflammatory. Just as Dickens and Stowe recast issues of stealing, killing, coveting, pride, avarice, sloth, lust, and even gluttony, anger, and envy as social constructs and political questions, so Gustave Flaubert changed the traditional critique of how and why women exist. Madame Bovary is an especially good example of how, without even meaning to, a novelist may transform the world simply by observing it. Flaubert, who had none of the reformist ambitions of Dickens and Stowe, famously remarked, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi"

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On the surface, this makes no sense. Flaubert is careful to describe Emma in a very particular way—a pretty young woman of peasant background who is not well educated, who marries a man she doesn't care for, and then gets involved in several affairs with other men who treat her badly. She finally commits suicide, leaving behind her a very confused husband and an uncomprehending daughter. Flaubert shows that Emma has no real taste or discrimination and is incapable of any sort of higher mental life. She is out of the ordinary in the stubbornness of her aspirations for some sort of relief from French provincial existence, but entirely ordinary in all of her talents and capacities. Flaubert depicts her minutely but mercilessly and coldly—there is no sense, as in, say, Moll Flanders or Vanity Fair, that the author has respect or grudging fondness for his heroine. Nor do Emma's problems seem to be caused by the society in which she lives—although many of those around her cheat and betray her, the tone of the novel suggests that everyone is doing the best he can do given his circumstances, and that the circumstances of French provincial life are not amenable to change (unlike the public health system in London, for example, or the existence of Negro slavery in the United States). What Flaubert adds to Emma is his own experience of the sensuousness of things. When Emma and Rodolphe are walking or driving, for example, the movement of the leaves in the trees or the passage of the carriage down the road is ravishing—to Emma and to the author, and therefore to the reader. To motivate Emma's fall, Flaubert infuses her inner life with exceptional richness, with what must have been his own sensitivity to sensation and to feeling. Madame Bovary was an instant and lasting success. Flaubert's embrace of Emma's way of experiencing things imparted to the novel a new degree of psychological insight and refinement and complicated the reader's experience of her lack of traditional virtue. This is not on the surface political, especially since "character is fate" for Emma as much as for the hero of any tragic play. Emma's road to her destiny is a train track downhill, and there is no sense that she can get off the train. But it is evident that there is something wrong with Emma, and pretty soon the reader begins to wonder about cause and effect. Is her persistent inability to fît into and accept her life her own fault or the fault of the provincial existence that the author clearly disdains? And if the problem lies within, is it something inborn, like looks or temperament, or does it have its origins in some life circumstance— motherlessness, perhaps? While Flaubert follows Emma's ups and

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downs seemingly moment by moment, he makes no suggestions about the reasons for her lack of fit. How she experiences her discomfort and dissatisfaction is how he represents it. He is more observant than she is, but as an artist, he clearly understands that if he were to subject her to some sort of analysis based on superior understanding, her fall would seem less inevitable and less dramatic. She would go back to being a typical young woman with no strength of character, whom the reader could easily judge and dismiss. The immediacy of his depiction, though, only strengthens the reader's tendency to wonder about the causes and effects that Flaubert ignores. As a result of Flaubert's technique and his identification with Emma, the astute reader can't help wondering whether, if the causes and effects of Emma's mental condition were understood more clearly (better than by the author or the narrator, let's say), perhaps an answer (or a cure) would present itself. And this response is a private one. The reader is not influenced by public conventions, such as those of the stage or the opera, to view the character's fate as a form of spectacle, but rather to view it as very akin to her own fate or the fate of a friend (and gossips always believe that they know what's best for the subject of the gossip, if only she would listen to them). Obviously, the rise of psychoanalysis (Freud was born a year before Madame Bovary was published), both as a theory and as a consumer good, grows out of this idea that causes can be traced and effects modified, and that a prolonged effort to do so is possible and even justified for the most average, Emma-like, readerlike person. Whether or not Freud ever read Madame Bovary, we can't help but think that Emma would present a tempting case for him, that he would diagnose her as hysterical, and that he would guide her into talking her way into fitting with the life she cannot abide (in our day, we would be tempted to diagnose her, too, maybe as bipolar or depressed, and to treat her with drugs). By giving Emma his own sensibility in such careful detail, Flaubert succeeds not only in writing a great novel but also in authoring the first, but by no means the last, case history. Just as an overtly political novel such as Uncle Tom's Cabin sparks a political response— the nation can be changed to fix injustice—a profoundly psychological novel sparks a response based in psychology—a person can be changed to fit her circumstances (especially if they are defined as all human circumstances). A traditionally moral issue, that of lust (and Emma lusts for all sorts of pleasures, not just sexual ones), becomes a medical one.

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And just as the social nature of the novel as a form requires injustice to be redressed, it also requires that personal suffering be relieved. We cannot imagine the characters of The Decameron or The Heptameron, with all their troubles, saying "What's wrong with me?" Like Roxana or Robinson Crusoe, they might say "How have I sinned and what am I going to do about it?" After centuries of education by novels, though, the average person has come to be routinely introspective, and to substitute therapeutic dilemmas and political questions for moral rules. All of the ways that morality and politics are tangled together in the novel come together in Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). M., the protagonist and narrator of Proust's seven volumes, has one primary rhetorical task—to maintain the reader's willingness to keep reading until he really gets to the essential points of his argument in volume seven, nearly four thousand pages into the novel; he must make himself attractive, or at least fascinating. He does so by characterizing himself in great detail, and these are some of his characteristics: he is tolerant and accepting of differences in lifestyles, opinions, and ways of doing things; he never demeans groups such as servants, homosexuals, or Jews that are routinely demeaned by others; he has good manners and acts in a generally kind way; he is a supporter of Dreyfus, the Jewish officer in the French army who was slandered and wrongfully imprisoned in the 1890s; he is skeptical of those who claim or seek power and influence; he is good at detecting hypocrisy, self-aggrandizement, social cruelty, and subtle rudeness in those around him, and he shows these qualities to be ridiculous and demeaning; he accepts that humans are complex, with both good and bad characteristics, and he also accepts that good and bad characteristics have little or no relation to success and failure. He is, in other words, the ideal liberal protagonist who speaks even of his own passions judiciously and analytically. He is, also, perhaps, unique in the history of the novel in his ability to hold a reader's interest at length. But M. has what most people would consider immoral proclivities with regard to young women of a Lolita age. He likes to exploit such girls and from time to time reports on his exploits. He shares several characteristics with the men in Justine—his most dramatic and in many ways significant accomplishment is to keep his young girlfriend, Albertine, imprisoned in his family home, restricting her movements and enforcing what amounts to solitude for some months, until she finally flees. He is as cruel and narcissistic in his

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imprisonment of Albertine as Humbert Humbert is in his imprisonment of Lolita, and exhibits far less shame. And yet Humbert, because he is disdainful and snobbish in his expressions, rather nasty in his treatment of others, and always unsociable (in comparison with M.'s ever-flowing sociability), is a model villain, while M. generally gets a pass on the villainy front because he is adept at arousing in the reader both sympathy and empathy. A significant feature of his success in obtaining the reader's forgiveness for his immoral acts is that the whole subject of his seven-volume novel is cause and effect; throughout the narrative, he continuously traces threads of psychological and sociological connection. He often considers the question of what might be wrong with him, and in the end his very ability to consider it so thoroughly persuades the reader either to accept what is wrong with him, or decide that whatever is wrong with him is worth the result. It is a great rhetorical accomplishment. Inevitably, as prefigured by Justine, the novel must amalgamate politics and sex, and, as with. Justine, many readers denounce the amalgamation on moral grounds when the real offense is political. A case in point is Lady Chatterley s Lover. Though Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned in England and in America because of its explicit scenes of lovemaking, it has come to seem merely bracing in its frankness about sexuality, while it still offers a fairly aggressive critique of early twentieth-century English society. The premise is simple, and similar to the premise of any number of French novels—the wife of a wealthy and landed gentleman, unsatisfied with her marriage, takes up with another man, in this case the gamekeeper on the Chatterley estate. The novel takes place in the wake of the First World War, and, significantly, both men have served in the war and been changed by it—Chatterley is paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, while Mellors, the gamekeeper, has used the opportunity to become more sophisticated in his thinking and less subservient in his manner. Chatterley is no long-suffering hero who has transcended his bodily injuries and found a higher purpose. He is a querulous, whiny, dog-in-the-manger sort who enjoys exerting the power he has, including his power over his wife, Connie, just for the sake of seeing others acknowledge it. Lawrence explicitly renders him as the representative of his class and his nation in terms of both his economic power and his emasculation. In spite of Chatterley's suffering, Lawrence isn't nice to him at all, and that remains probably the only shocking element of the novel (though there is one scene where, over dinner, Mellors and Connie's father dis-

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cuss her sexual behavior in a way that seems more than crude, as well as politically incorrect, of course). Lawrence wrote in a traditional realistic style that makes his critique all the more straightforward and his sex scenes all the more confrontational. Part of the reason that Lady Chatterley's Lover has ceased to shock, however, is that it doesn't really challenge Connie's subordinate position. For the sake of sexual pleasure, she shifts "owners," from Chatterley to Mellors, but Mellors is gruff and rude and promises Connie only motherhood, not power or even agency. Nevertheless, the banning of Lady Chatterley's Lover had the characteristic effect of making the novel desirable and, in this case, eventually bringing the portrayal of sex on the page so much more into the literary mainstream that what once seemed shocking on the page (when the novel was printed in Italy and Lawrence's friend told him that it was a good thing the compositor couldn't read English or he might have refused to set the type) now seems quaint and sentimental. Twentieth-century novelists were not able to return to the preDickensian idea of evil as randomly distributed, causeless, and incorrigible, but it was not for lack of trying. Many twentieth-century novelists explicitly rejected the nineteenth-century project of social improvement, but the novel itself defied them. The best some novelists were able to do was return to a Jane Austen—like setting of manners and personal relationships, but all plots require conflict; once the nineteenth-century novelists had broadened the representable world and deepened the representable inner life, had applied complexity to both, and come up with ever more refined and intelligent logical connections, the novel's inherent political (and ideological) nature was revealed, and morality and politics in the novel could never be separated again.

7 • The Art of the Novel

or many generations, the novel had no pretensions to art. The — novel was not rooted in classical rhetorical and imaginative forms, nor taught in schools and universities. Because novels were read for pleasure rather than "improvement," novelists were from the beginning autodidacts, reading their own, idiosyncratic "courses" of novels, picking and choosing what to emulate and imitate, often writing in secret and pleasing themselves first of all rather than teachers or scholars. Numerous novelists published anonymously or under pseudonyms—Madame de La Fayette, Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot—doing so because they had something to lose by claiming their work, usually respectability. Novelists who published under their own names were often those who were not socially prominent or who, like Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, already had literary lives before they began to write novels. Artistically, novelists were do-it-yourselfers, and what they knew about "the novel" they gleaned from their favorite authors. We know from their own testimony that Forster read James, James read Dickens, Dickens read Smollett, Smollett read Cervantes, Cervantes read Marguerite of Navarre, Marguerite read Boccaccio (and, of course, Forster read Cervantes, Dickens read Scott, Scott read Boccaccio, Scott read Cervantes, Fielding read Cervantes, Dickens read Cervantes, Woolf read Austen, Dickens, and James, Stendhal read Marguerite, Balzac read Stendhal, James read Balzac, Turgenev read Stendhal, Stendhal read Madame de La Fayette, Madame de La Fayette read Marguerite de Navarre, Dostoevsky read Turgenev, Tolstoy read Turgenev, Gogol read Turgenev, Turgenev read Lermontov, Lermontov read Scott, Tanizaki read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Lady Murasaki, and so forth). Though some novelists have had classical educations, many, such as Defoe, Dickens, and almost every woman, had a Shakespeare-type education, "small Latin and less Greek." Many novelists' innovative

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and lively attachment to vernacular speech and up-to-the-minute forms of expression remained uncontaminated by the early drudgery of translating long passages of Latin and Greek. There was nothing "correct" about the novel to begin with (akin to, for example, the classical unities of the drama), and so every author was free to experiment with what might be incorrect but satisfying. When their own compositions became famous and popular, each novelist's techniques entered into both the narrative and the technical lexicon of the novel. Seminal novelists and others made a technical contribution to the art of writing novels along with a contribution to the treasury of stories, settings, and characters—later novelists testified to their influence. Cervantes showed not only that a long narrative of an innocent man traveling about the countryside had virtually unlimited plot possibilities, but also that a narrative voice talking about such adventures in a chatty way was both agreeable and reassuring. Madame de La Fayette showed not only that all three participants in a love triangle could be equally sympathetic, but also that a narrator could efface herself sufficiently to seem to enter transparently into the thoughts of each of the participants, thereby raising the story above the level of gossipy speculation into the realm of philosophy. When Daniel Defoe wrote in the different voices of Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, H. F , Roxana, and the others, he showed that an author could do two things at one time—observe his protagonist and embody him—giving the reader a rich empathetic experience while maintaining control of the themes that the life of the protagonist represented. When Fielding combined the conventions of stage comedy with the peripatetic adventures of an apparent reprobate, he showed that the juxtaposition of high and low was stimulating as well as broadening. When Lermontov placed his Byronic protagonist in the precisely and lyrically rendered landscape of the Caucasus, he showed how the Russian novel could be made both grand and irreducibly Russian in spite of imported ideas. When Balzac expanded his canvas by having major characters in one novel turn up as minor characters in others, he began to capture the kaleidoscopic variety of France and especially of Paris, but he also showed that while plots are good organizing devices and lenses for viewing particular lives and incidents, they do not need to dictate the roles particular characters, and, by extension, readers, play. Each spécifie contribution was not necessarily invented by each seminal novelist. Every period was full of inventors and novelists who are now lost in general obscurity but who were nevertheless read by their

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contemporaries, whose new ideas were noticed and made use of. Technical ideas about the craft of novel-writing are not intellectual property except insofar as they are wedded to particular words written in particular sequences. Rather, techniques are subtle expansions of perception that stimulate a reader's thoughts about his own ideas and perceptions in new ways.* The novel, in fact, requires technical innovation, because there is simply no way to make the time pass and the characters exist within a particular setting without being inventive. Even if I set out to rewrite Don Quixote incident by incident with the merest detail changed (let's say, the action happens ten years after the action of the real Don Quixote), I will be presented with some challenge or other that requires a technical solution—perhaps the reign of one king has given way to that of another and two or three laws governing travel from town to town have changed, or deforestation has altered part of Quixote's landscape. If a handful of details about Quixote's journey are no longer plausible, then those details ramify into other scenes, and pretty soon I have a different novel altogether, as, indeed, Cervantes himself had a different novel altogether in the second volume of Don Quixote from the novel he had in the first. Great seminal novelists may or may not be more rawly original than their contemporaries; what they do is manage to wed originality of technique with depth of insight or breadth of knowledge or charm or some other quality that demonstrates the value of that technical innovation and makes it memorable to future novelists. An author's technique grows out of his temperament, his intentions, and his ideas, but it also grows out of his circumstances. A good example is Laurence Sterne. Sterne was classically educated, at Cambridge University, and he became a clergyman in Yorkshire, but he had no money apart from his living and the fees he sometimes received for giving sermons in York Minster. Like Defoe, he plied his pen for some twenty years in service of partisan politics, at least in part as *Sometimes the reader doesn't know how stimulated she has been. In retrospect, for example, I can see how much my novel Moo owes to David Lodge's novel Small World, but at the time, I perceived only that I loved Lodge's novel and that it gave me permission to loosely corral many characters into one capacious narrative rather than to focus on the adventures of a single protagonist. While I was reading Small World, I was focusing on the jokes and the Arthurian references. While I was writing Moo, I was thinking about coordinating the action of the plot to the period of the school year and working out the ecological theme and structure. Small World existed in my mind as a template I was semi-aware of (I had read it once) and remembered with fondness.

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repayment for clerical preferments he received from powerful friends and relatives in and around York. The first two volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, however, were conceived as explicitly nonpolitical, a reaction to having incurred the wrath of the Church of England in 1759 with a satire on church politics called "A Political Romance." Sterne was surprised by Tristram Shandy's wild success, but he reveled in it, even in the negative attention (Dr. Johnson was certain its popularity was a passing fad), and was soon a famous man, consorting with David Garrick, meeting the king, and having his portrait painted by Joshua Reynolds. As usual with best sellers, though, it quickly became apparent that the author had to keep writing to maintain the income stream. Sterne was more than willing to do whatever he could to sustain his popularity—one of the first ideas he had was to publish a volume of his own sermons under the name "Parson Yorick," a character in Tristram Shandy, implying an autobiographical link between the racy novel (which, of course, frankly discusses all sorts of bodily functions in addition to sex) and his career as a clergyman. Next, he composed two more volumes about Tristram, emphasizing what he considered to be its strongest selling point: eccentricity. Ultimately he published nine volumes in the 1760s, never changing his tone or his method, though gradually shifting his story away from Tristram and his parents toward the mild and mysterious eccentric Uncle Toby. In his embrace of his signature techniques—bawdy jokes, odd ideas and observations, digressions, thought association—in a ten-year effort to sustain sales, Sterne is almost a parody of novelists in general. And he was right. Though he tried another book—a travel narrative about a journey through France and Italy—it was not successful because it did not have that precise combination of subject and sensibility that seemed so original, and turned out to be so lasting, in Tristram Shandy. With repeated employment, a certain technique ceases to be technical and comes to characterize an author's entire oeuvre and to constitute his original vision. Jane Austen claimed that her works were like miniatures painted on ivory—she was ambitious not for breadth, or even depth, but for precision. She not only knew what she wanted to do and could do (given her secluded life), she also knew how she was distinct from other novelists, and she liked to exploit her distinction. Her technique did not seem to limit her ability to grow, though—each successive heroine is different from the others, each new family is set

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into a somewhat larger context than earlier families. Austen's miniatures expand and deepen without bursting off the ivory. Anthony Trollope, more worldly and more ambitious than Austen but possessed of a similar judicious, ironic style, wrote forty-seven novels by employing a rigorous system of composition that on the surface does not even look like a technique as much as a lifestyle—when he was planning The Way We Live Now, he scheduled himself to write some ten thousand words per week and to complete the two-volume, 950-page (in the Oxford edition) novel in thirty-two weeks. He finished in twenty-nine weeks. For most of his writing career (from age twenty until fifty-two) he worked as a civil servant in the post office— he wrote his weekly ten thousand words beginning at about five-thirty every morning. Trollope was no dull boy—he loved fox hunting, socializing, traveling, eating, and drinking, and made time for a good measure of each. In addition, Trollope, who, like Sterne, was sensitive about the hardships of an impoverished childhood, cared a great deal about "pecuniary emolument," as Jane Austen would have called it. In Trollope's autobiography (begun when he was about sixty and published after his death) he related as many details about deals he had made and the relative success or failure of each book as about more personal aspects of his life or more artful aspects of his career. The effect of his autobiography was to diminish his posthumous reputation as a novelist, but the systematic approach he espoused as a way of succeeding professionally worked also as a narrative technique, a way of exploring in great detail certain aspects of the inner life and of the many facets of English bourgeois existence that he is famous for anatomizing. It is, of course, impossible to encapsulate Trollope's accomplishments in a few paragraphs, but a passage from The Eustace Diamonds might convey something of his technique: Lady Linlithgow, upon whom Lizzie's beauty could have no effect of that kind, had nevertheless declared her to be very beautiful. And this loveliness was of a nature that was altogether pleasing, if once the beholder of it could get over the idea of falseness which certainly Lizzie's eye was apt to convey to the beholder, [p. 358] A few lines later, Trollope turns his attention to Lizzie's lover:

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All this had been tendered to Frank—and with it that worldly wealth which was so absolutely necessary to his career. For though Greystock would not have said to any man or woman that nature had intended him to be a spender of much money and a consumer of many good things, he did undoubtedly so think of himself. Trollope's methodical habits are evident in both these passages. In the midst of love, there is calculation—Lizzie's beauty against her false nature; Frank's desires and ambitions against his instinctive recognition of Lizzie's nature; and, in both cases, external appearance against internal truth. His style works the same way, though to more poignant effect, in The Last Chronicle ofBarset, where the calculation is about a minor crime: Does the poor, charitable, passionate, but irritable and stiff-necked curate actually pass a bad check? And who of his associates is ready to believe such a thing, and who is unconvinced? Trollope is a genius of measurement—yes, in his autobiography, he counts up the money and totes up his success, but in his novels he weighs and balances and measures the ramifications of countless decisions, impulses, and feelings, recognizing always that in a tightly interconnected culture, the smallest wrong step can have dire consequences, but also that it is possible to think too much and thereby destroy happiness that impulse might have gained. Trollope was a great analyst of marriage as a series of decisions that turn into a relationship and then, as time goes by and the children grow up, into history and architecture; simultaneously, he was the great analyst of politics as it devolves into feelings and their effects on the nation. If we say that Trollope is the ultimate realist, we are recognizing that his work as well as his life recognized more points of view, more endeavors, more sensations, more things to think about and reasons to think about them than almost any other novelist; that the technique he developed for balancing the attractions of these sensations—in sentences, paragraphs, chapters, characters, and entire books—beautifully mimics the way many people construct their identities moment by moment. Since no novel can simply exist, like a painting or a sculpture, but must communicate something intelligible, the ways in which it can be well crafted are numerous, and since the twin challenges of time and space are always present, novelists never lose sight of technical questions, and technical questions are always rhetorical ones as well.

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At the beginning of the twentieth century, though, novelists began making a case not only that novels were art, but also that certain qualities of certain novels were more artistic than others. Whether a novel should be, or could be, art was not, of course, entirely an aesthetic question, given both the novel's history as morally suspect and its wide appeal. The questions were still to some extent framed in terms of technique, but the ideal was no longer just to promote the novel's ability to communicate more and more details about more and more things, but also to have an aesthetic shape or effect that would be intended by the author and felt by the reader as consciously graceful, beautiful, or "right." The foremost proponent of these sorts of ideas was Henry James, both implicitly in the way he wrote his novels and explicitly in what he wrote about them. As a young man, James reviewed both Dickens and Trollope, and not kindly. Of one of Trollope's novels he wrote, "Life is vulgar, but we know not how vulgar it is until we see it set down in his pages" (review of Can You Forgive Her?, quoted in Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope). With Our Mutual Friend he was not impressed, declaring it "the poorest of Mr. Dickens's works" (quoted in Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens). And even though James seems to have admired George Eliot and attempted to get to know her and her companion George Henry Lewes, he still considered Middlemarch "an indifferent whole." We can tell by his subsequent writings, his own novels, and his essays on the nature of the novel as a form that he aspired to produce something simultaneously less vulgar and less formless than the novels of the great Victorians, and that he wished his work to elevate the novel to the status of art. James's first successful novel was The Portrait of a Lady, published in 1881, when James was thirty-eight. His "lady" is Isabel Archer, an American young woman who is brought to Europe by her aunt, to give her a year abroad before she gets married. Isabel is an appealing, independent-minded young woman who isn't ready to yield to the charms, such as they are, of her American suitor. Soon enough, in England, she attracts the attention of two more men—her invalid cousin Ralph and an attractive aristocrat who doesn't seem to attract Isabel. Giving up the protections of engagement and marriage, though, proves more dangerous than Isabel foresees. Her aunt is blind to the possibility that Isabel might be duped, but when Isabel is left a large inheritance, her fate is decided. She falls into the clutches of the

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elegant but penniless Madame Merle, who introduces her to Gilbert Osmond, an American in Florence with no visible means of support and an expensive habit of connoisseurship. By the end of the novel it is clear to Isabel that she is trapped—her marriage is an evil, loveless sham (Osmond is portrayed as being a vaguely satanic combination of calculation and vengeful selfishness), her child has died, and she has lost access to Osmond's daughter, of whom she is fond. Everything that Isabel has learned about love and marriage growing up in the United States turns out to be wrong—in Europe, marriage is a pure commodity relationship, and it is the fate of girls (including Osmond's daughter) to be bought, sold, and dominated. Their only choices are to accept their fate knowingly or to undergo it without understanding it. That Isabel would suffer disillusionment is only a measure of her former illusions. In The Portrait of a Lady, James does what he had intended to do— he excludes the vulgar by focusing on a few wealthy and well-educated Europeans and Americans, and he uses intense psychological analysis and careful depiction of settings to fill the spots where the vulgar might have been. The plot of James's novel, so similar to myriad earlier plots about what is to be done with women and what they could conceivably do with themselves, unfolds with great deliberateness as Isabel's friends and the narrator contemplate her fate. Isabel herself is something of a cipher—perhaps she is reserved, perhaps she is independent, perhaps she is unusually innocent, but she seems to recede as the novel progresses. Not knowing what she wants, she turns down many things that are offered. When she does choose something (to take a tour), James does not follow her and show the reader how it affects her. When we rejoin her after the tour, we are supposed to understand how she now contrasts to who she had been before the tour, but the contrasts are hazy because Isabel retains her reserve. For compelling dynamism in her character James substitutes analysis of her in his narrative voice. This has the effect of circumscribing her even further. The narrator expresses his admiration of her, but the reader can't help feeling intuitively that she is as trapped by his reportorial voice as she is by the expectations of those around her. Nevertheless, Isabel's fate is affecting, particularly so because she is very young and Osmond is not especially old, either. The trap she seems destined to inhabit is going to last a long time. James and his friend Edith Wharton were ambitious Americans. They recognized that, as vital and satisfying as the tradition of the

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English novel was, English novels were missing something that French novels possessed—psychological refinement and depth. They wanted to get that depth into their own novels, but to avoid the sordid subjects that were the meat and potatoes of the French novel. James reveals his basic principle, and basic fear, in his introduction to Roderick Hudson, in the uniform edition of his novels that was published as the "New York Edition" in 1907. James is explicit about the fact that as soon as he began to write this first novel (in 1874), he began to worry: "I recall again the quite uplifted sense with which my idea, such as it was, permitted me at last to put quite out to sea. . . . Yet it must even then have begun for me, too, the ache of fear, that was to become so familiar, of being unduly tempted and led on by 'developments'" (The Art of the Novel, p. 4). He goes on, somewhat later, in a typically elaborate but telling Jamesian simile: "A young embroiderer of the canvas of life [James himself, of course] soon began to work in terror, fairly, of the vast expanse of that surface, of the boundless number of its distinct perforations for the needle, and of the tendency inherent in his many-coloured flowers and figures to cover and consume as many as possible of the little holes" (p. 5). Throughout the introductions of the New York Edition, James recalls how ideas for novels came to him through a single chance remark made to him at a party or a detail relayed to him over dinner. As soon as a particular "seed' struck him, he would make strenuous efforts not to hear any more of the details surrounding the actual incident or character being related because in his own mind, details and connections were already burgeoning. Prominent Victorian authors, of course, specialized in "developments"—as a result, much of the action in their books had to be a bit melodramatic, if only to have definition. Henry James, though, wanted to write important novels in which the action was less melodramatic—books not about murders and suicides and virtue beset, but about the progress of the inner life, in which the climax might be only a silent recognition by the protagonist that she has made a commitment fatal to her happiness. Readers had to be educated to understand the weight of such subterranean drama, and so in the course of the three decades after The Portrait of a Lady, James disciplined the novel in several ways. He rarely wrote in the first person, but almost always in the third-person limited point of view,* and he often located that point of view in one or two characters present in *The Turn of the Screw is in the first person.

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the action of the novel but peripheral to it, as he relates the bad behavior of Maisie's parents in What Maisie Knew through Maisie's uncomprehending eyes, or as he relates The Ambassadors through the consciousness of Lambert Strether. The effect of this was to get two for one—the events unfold, those centrally implicated act out their drama, and the effects of their drama on those around them are evident, too. In the case of The Ambassadors, the drama has a more significant effect on Strether, who decides in late middle age not to let life pass him by, than it does on the lovers he has come to Europe to break up, and James gets to simultaneously explore the hidden drama of Strether's inner life and the overt drama of Chad and Madame de Vionnet's mildly shocking affair. In his introduction to The Golden Bowl, James refers to something he disapproves of—"the mere muffled majesty of irresponsible 'authorship' " that results from not locating clearly both the events of the story and the perspective from which it is to be viewed. Even when the filtering narrative consciousness is all but indistinguishable from James himself, the discipline of naming and characterizing the filtering consciousness organizes the way in which James the author can talk about the plot and the protagonist. The protagonist is also always set into a specific and carefully rendered social milieu, which becomes part of the story, on the one hand, and defines how intimate the novel may get, on the other. James often writes about subjects that in other hands would be considered immoral (in The Wings of the Dove, a couple concocts a plan in which the man will seduce and marry a wealthy but dying American heiress to get her fortune; in the course of the novel, the focus of the young man's passions shifts from one girl to the other), but the strict arrangement of the material and the effect of James's elaborate style in rendering all feelings and passions analyzable and characterizable enables him to raise their level of respectability, their level of complexity, and their level of aesthetic satisfaction. James's work gains a great deal of intensity through the contrast of the inner life of a passionate or idealistic character with the ironclad proprieties of his or her world, and is quite successful at portraying the pain of compromise, self-knowledge, and endurance. Significantly, James was also much afraid of having to go too far afield. He comments on this in the preface to Daisy Miller when he recalls a visit to New York that he made in the 1870s. He found himself stuck "at the very moderate altitude of Twenty-fifth Street. . . alone . . . with the music-masters and French pastry-cooks, the ladies

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and children—immensely present and immensely numerous these, but testifying with a collective voice to the extraordinary absence . . . of a serious male interest." Prohibited (he implies by financial considerations) from investigating what was going on on Wall Street, "and New York was, for force and accent, nothing else worth speaking of," James chose a different milieu to explore in his novels, not a milieu of work but one of leisure. Obviously James was not suited by talent or temperament to make a case for expansiveness as a virtue in the novel, so he made the case for form, a form based, as in classical painting, on perspective. Just as in great Renaissance and Baroque paintings the arrangement of the figures depends for effect on where the painter positions the viewer, so what the reader learns about the story James is telling is carefully controlled by the character (or consciousness) assigned by the author to tell the story. Underscoring this effect is the care and detail with which James depicts settings; many James novels read like a series of tableaux vivants, where the American characters are dwarfed by their European surroundings, which embody history and tradition as well as art and beauty. Wherever they come from in America, what the characters do is not about who they are and cannot truly be understood apart from the particular buildings, streets, towns, and landscapes in which they find themselves in Europe. When James fails to follow Isabel Archer on her tour, for example, he indicates that who she is and the context of her decisions about her life are not to be understood as a result of what she does, but as the product of the social context in which she finds herself at the time she is making the decision. James's argument about what was better and what was best (the depiction of moral dilemmas being better and the ever more refined parsing of motive and character being best, with the hand of the author always masterful but hidden) was not directed at the traditional audience of the novel—let's say the Defoe/Dickens audience, who thought the novel was fine and plenty artful; it was directed at the sort of audience who would have the taste to read and the money to buy the elaborate New York Edition of his works, some twenty-three volumes, and, also, to himself as a celebration and perhaps justification of his lifelong devotion (with a short hiatus in the 1890s, when he wrote unsuccessfully for the London stage) to a suspect form. James was not a popular writer—he often lamented the poor sales of his novels—but he had a powerful effect on novelists who came after him, and on the very idea of what a novel should be, especially

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in England and the United States. But other novelists had opinions, too, and one of these was Leo Tolstoy, who in 1898 published his own manifesto, "What Is Art?" Tolstoy, like James, seems to be reacting to the nineteenth-century novelistic social project, but his reaction is diametrically opposed to James's. Tolstoy begins his argument not with the novel but with other commonly accepted forms of art—music, ballet, and drama—and describes the ill-paid and difficult labor that goes into producing such art. He focuses especially on the disparities of social class that these (and other forms) promote and confirm—art is an economic product like any other in that those who work the hardest to produce it have the least wherewithal to understand it or to consume it (the workers can't afford the fruits of their labor). The wrinkle in Tolstoy's analysis is that, unlike James, he considers exclusiveness a bad thing; the problem is not in the uneducated taste of one class of potential consumers, but in the perverted taste of the other class of confirmed consumers (and producers). True art, Tolstoy asserts, would appeal to universal human thoughts, desires, and needs, would be simple to understand, would be inclusive rather than exclusive. Tolstoy was particularly offended by the erotic content of the art he surveyed, and he contends that much of the purpose of art in his day was to inflame the passions of the jaded upper class; he also attacks notions of beauty and pleasure as class-based and empty. He angrily throws Shakespeare, Dante, and even himself into the trash bin. To us, Tolstoy seems to be purveying a belief in the sort of utopianism that ended up producing the nightmares of the twentieth century, but his polemic is a natural extension of the methods of the nineteenthcentury novel—should enough material be organized and clearly arranged according to sometimes subtle but ultimately understandable principles of not only cause and effect but sympathy and empathy, then the wholesale transformation of society into something more like a novel—something organized and connected, something if not happier, then smarter—could follow. The proper art could "fix" society, but improper art (and this is the source of Tolstoy's anger—he is surrounded by improper art) can only damage society. His experience of the peasantry on his estate, to begin with, and other "true Russians" not of the upper class has convinced him that erotic passion in particular, but other forms of greed, selfishness, and brutality as well, have their source not in changeless human nature but in social arrangements and contaminating images and ideas—an extension of the ideas of many nineteenth-century novelists, including Dickens and Stowe,

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but seen through a point of view more religious and less pragmatic than either of theirs. Novelists after James and Tolstoy were shaped by their influence in several ways. In England, the next generation of novelists reacted strongly against James in a formal sense, constructing the modernist novel in contrast to the "traditional realist novel" (which was really more or less the novels of Henry James and his English contemporaries such as Arnold Bennett, since James had excluded the stranger characteristics of the novel represented by Dickens, Stowe, Melville, and the Brontes from the realm of true art), but they accepted his basic idea that the novel was, or could be, exclusive rather than inclusive, and that a novel without much popular appeal could do things artistically that a novel with popular appeal could not. They accepted his idea that the audience for a quality novel might not be large enough to support the author by means of commerce; this idea is a truism today, but it was new, and even revolutionary, for Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and many of their contemporaries. The Bloomsbury group, which consisted of Virginia Woolf, her husband, Leonard; her sister, Vanessa, a painter; and several other essayists and intellectuals, was bohemian in a sense, but it was never low-class; Virginia's (and Leonard's) novel-writing was never considered less artistically innovative or respectable than the painting, criticism, and essay-writing of the others. The men of Bloomsbury were university-educated in the most socially accepted way; two generations earlier, they would have become clergymen. Thanks in part to the fact that Henry James set up and promoted a socially respectable form of the novel, they could now become intellectuals and artists. In addition, Virginia Woolf looked to her friends and relatives for inspiration. She observed and depicted them, as novelists have always done, but James's precepts gave her an added justification—she was creating art, something new and valuable that had never been thought of before and would be true in a way that previous novels had not been true. She was explicit about this in many essays, in particular "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," which she revised several times. Her complaint against Arnold Bennett and his contemporaries, realist novelists all, was that they lose the sense of "life" and "human nature" by focusing too much on the materials of the set, on the "upholstery of the carriage"—in other words, that in the always restricted linear discipline of unfolding prose, they have devoted too many words to furniture and not enough to capturing sensations, especially momentary ones. She defends some

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of the techniques and effects of her contemporaries by claiming that awkwardness and discomfort are necessary corollaries to breaking free from old strictures. Of Ulysses, she points out, it "seems to me the conscious and calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows." But Woolf 's attack in 1934 on Arnold Bennett was class-based, also. When he died, she encapsulated his life in her diary: "a shop keeper's view of literature; yet with the rudiments, covered over with fat and prosperity and the desire for hideous Empire furniture, of sensibility . . . I remember his determination to write iooo words daily; and how he trotted off to do it that night." For Woolf and her contemporaries, James's imprimatur of "art" and the privacy and status of uncommerciality allowed them to explore what the middle class—the great audience of Dickens and many other Victorian novelists—considered to be uninteresting but also immoral topics. Of course, it is every novelist's claim, standard at least from the days of Marguerite de Navarre, that what is "novel" in his or her work is also important to the true understanding of human nature; it worked in the 1920s to allow a new class of writers with a different set of values and interests into the hitherto popular realm of the novel, and it also worked to promote the artificial bifurcation of the novel into more prestigious "critical successes" and less prestigious "popular successes." It worked, in fact, just the same way for novelists from the educated classes as it always had for other excluded groups, expanding the subject matter, the style, the tone, and the audience for the novel as a form. For the rest of the twentieth century, novelists, readers, and critics continued to argue about what was artful in the novel, but they accepted James's premise that some novels were art, and other, more commercial ones, were not. E. M. Forster, who was a contemporary of Woolf and Joyce, wrote a book called Aspects of the Novel that takes up the issue of "What Is Art?" and addresses James specifically on the subject of form. Forster's witty, benign style is especially generous in some ways—Aspects of the Novel has held up over the years because it doesn't seem like merely an advertisement for Forster's own work— but his criticism of James is pointed. After a lengthy appreciation of James's own favorite novel, The Ambassadors, Forster remarks, "The beauty that suffuses The Ambassadors is the reward due to a fine artist for hard work. . . . Success to the full extent of his possibilities has crowned him. The pattern has woven itself with modulation and

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reservations Anatole France will never attain. Woven itself wonderfully. But at what a sacrifice!" (p. 159). What most readers object to, according to Forster, is not the difficulty of the prose, but the fact that "they cannot grant his premise, which is that most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel" (p. 160). What Forster objects to is the subjection of the novel's natural profusion to the rigors of a structure that is evident to the reader's sensibility, to what is required so the reader will stop thinking of a novel as life (which is disorganized and chock-full of uncontrollable developments) and start thinking of it as art, which is conscious of itself at all times. Forster proposes that the novelist in search of artfulness substitute the model of music for the model of painting, and that he attempt to attain a kind of internal pattern analogous to rhythm. He uses In Search of Lost Time as his example. When Proust repeats certain ideas and themes in his fourthousand-page novel, they constitute a "lovely waxing and waning" whose effect is "to fill us with surprise and freshness and hope." The huge French novel is not asked to limit itself and fix itself inside a structure, "and yet it hangs together because it is stitched internally" (p. 165). Unfortunately for his argument, Forster does not point out in contrasting The Ambassadors with In Search of Lost Time that the former is written in James's customary third-person limited point of view, while the latter is written in an absolutely unashamed first-person point of view, which allows Proust the freedom to digress and yet remain within the consistent voice of a single consciousness. Consistency is Proust's default setting (as it is the default setting of every firstperson narrator), so "developments" enliven the narrative but never disrupt it. Whether artistic "rhythm" can be achieved in a novel written in the third person is a question Forster's own novel A Passage to India sheds light upon (see below). Needless to say, though, from the perspective of Tolstoy's argument, In Search of Lost Time only compounds the problems of art as both immoral and exclusive. Fortunately for us, all four of our theorists of art in the novel put their theories to the test by writing novels as they thought novels should be written. What we have to learn from looking at their works is not that one or the other had a better or worse theory, but that the form of the novel was in many ways too powerful or too intransigent to be subdued by a mere theory. If we consider A Passage to India* in light *For plot synopses of A Passage to India and Anna Karenina, readers unfamiliar with those works may consult the section "A Hundred Novels" in the latter part of this book.

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of Forster's admiration of Proust, we see that the novel is Proustian in the sense that all relationships depicted in the novel are personal, and all betrayals are personal, too, as in Proust. When the scene of these relationships and betrayals is transposed from France to India, though, and the characters must relate across highly charged boundaries of race and class, Forster's political insights into Anglo India become profound, and the novel almost unbearably poignant. The primary "rhythmical" feature is the enigmatic Professor Godbole, who appears in several of the scenes, sometimes as a friendly figure, who is always kindly and well-disposed, but sometimes as an unfriendly figure, who hampers the plans of the protagonists; in the end, he is neutral, as if divine. Nevertheless, the "rhythm" of In Search of host Time and of^4 Passage to India is not what makes each novel memorable—it is rather the intelligence and insight of each narrative consciousness. Proust could employ all sorts of subtle patterning devices, but if his remarks were not regularly arresting and his metaphors not original and apt, the novel would just seem gassy and pretentious. If Forster were not truly interested in the inner life of Aziz, were not authentically empathetic with him and the other characters, A Passage to India would be just another example of colonial novelizing. Furthermore, Forster accepts, at least implicitly, the nature of the novel as a social document—he doesn't shrink at all from depicting particular customs among particular people at a particular historic juncture—he doesn't find them fleeting or peripheral, he finds them interesting and worth carefully describing. The effect, in 2005, is to give A Passage to India currency. By acknowledging its own specificity and depicting, without overt political theories, a plethora of personal relationships—that is, because it beautifully exploits characteristics natural to the novel as a form—A Passage to India seems less dated and more insightful than many other novels of its day. To the Lighthouse, written three years after A Passage to India, offers an interesting paradox. Woolf divides the novel into three sections. The first focuses on an apparently routine summer day before the First World War, and details the more or less idle thoughts of a more or less happy family ensconced at their summer retreat by the sea. Woolf 's narrative method is to pass from one consciousness to another, simultaneously telling the story of the day and limning the subjective experiences of each of the characters, including the youngest, James, who is six years old. One of the things Woolf demonstrates about "life" and "human nature" is that time does not move steadily and evenly. Rather,

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some moments take many pages to describe, as, for example, the moment between when Mrs. Ramsay, James's mother, holds a stocking she is knitting up to James's leg to gauge whether it is long enough, and when she decides it is not and takes it away again. The third section focuses on a routine day after the war, when James, his sister, and their father return to the summer retreat. The family is much reduced, in particular by the death of Mrs. Ramsay, but also by the deaths of two of the other children, one in the war and one in childbirth. In this section, the father and the children manage to achieve a goal promised in the first section, a boat trip to the lighthouse, which no longer has the meaning it once did for James (said to be a stand-in for Woolf herself), but can't help accruing new meanings in the context of both James's losses and his maturation. The short middle section, "Time Passes," narrates the losses of the war in terms of the neglect and deterioration of the house while the family is too preoccupied to visit—in this section, the turning of the light and the passage of its beam through the windows of the house ticks away the passage of time both away from the idyllic era of the first section and toward the compromised but fascinating era of the third section. The result is both artful and poignant, but the paradox, with regard to Woolf 's theories, is that her method, the method with which she intends to expand the reach of the novel, cannot actually encompass events of dramatic and historical significance. It magnifies the difficulty the novel has with the passage of time. Dramatic action, of course, is always difficult for prose, and no novel can depict two things at once, but some novels can give the illusion of doing so by ordering vivid and various details unforgettably in the mind of the reader so that when the climax, the biggest piece of action, happens, the reader seems to herself to understand it all—good examples of this are the tripartite climax of A Tale of Two Cities (where Darnay's escape is contrasted to Miss Pross's fight with Madame Defarge, which in turn gives way to Sydney Carton's execution) and the climax of Toni Morrison's Beloved (where Sethe's recollection of the failed escape from the plantation is set into the context of the other incidents the reader has been introduced to that led up to and resulted from it). Tolstoy's theory seems not to apply at all to Anna Karenina—in "What Is Art?" he repudiates the very claims of such characters as Anna, Vronsky, Karenin, and even Levin and Kitty, to any sort of consideration whatsoever. In particular, Anna, Vronsky, and Karenin, whose passions give the reader entry into what would otherwise be a

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dry and didactic exercise in Levin's learning to do the right thing in spite of himself, exemplify the very cultivation of the erotic he so deplores. We have to imagine Karenin, the cuckolded husband, as prefiguring the man Tolstoy himself became—immune to the charms of his wife, intimidating and forbidding, more interested in rules and forms than affections or other, softer feelings, and resentful of such passions in others. Fortunately, Tolstoy's ability to observe the world around him, to deduce meaning and order from human behavior, and to attach outer expression to inner feeling is a genius he demonstrates that is much more solid and satisfying than his penchant for theories. He is interested in and sympathetic toward Anna in spite of himself; he understands the destructiveness of maleness against femaleness in spite of himself; whatever the moral claims of universal simplicity, he doesn't rely upon it to carry the reader through his novel, and even more fortunately, the novel itself, having been published and distributed, having become the possession of countless readers, defies its author's urge to censor it. The lesson we learn from our little survey is that even though our authors' theories would seem to exclude one another's claims to artistry, their actual works do not. Any reader (for example, me) can enjoy and value Anna Karenina, The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, A Passage to India, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando with no trouble whatsoever. It doesn't even begin to be difficult to read these six novels in sequence, enjoying them all fully, and, indeed, understanding and accepting them. What we realize when we read them is that they are more alike than different, that they all have the same claims as art, and that individual readers are always likely to prefer one or two over the others. Of course, Virginia Woolf had another literary critical project besides the exploration of consciousness, which was the promotion of women as worthy authors, both in terms of recognizing the value of what women had already produced and of preparing the ground for future works. In this she was, in some sense, more akin to Tolstoy than to James. While not offering as scathing a picture of the privileged class of artists as Tolstoy offers at the beginning of "What Is Art?," she is no less definite about her belief that the traditional exclusion of women from the artistic class is unfair, wrong, and distorting to art itself. As far as Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown are concerned, she champions Mrs. Brown as an example of consciousness—"of unlimited capacity and infinite variety"—but also as a woman—"an old lady."

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The assertion Woolf makes, that the absence of women from literary history constitutes a glaring omission, seems obvious today, and shines backward over all the literature that has gone before: Did James really get into the mind of Isabel Archer? Did Shakespeare really get into the mind of Ophelia? Woolf doesn't exactly say no, but she casts a doubt, and it is a doubt that affected much of twentieth-century discussion of literature. Each of our theorists has had an effect on ideas of art and the novel in the past eighty years, exactly the period when the novel as a form has spread all over the world. The effect has been to make novelists and novels self-conscious by requiring serious novelists to have, and to be able to articulate, at least to themselves, a higher or larger goal. Some novelists have actively pursued Tolstoy's social program—the portrayal of those who can't or don't portray themselves, often in pursuit of a higher social goal. In this category I would put Sholokhov (And Quiet Flows the Don), Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God), Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath), Faulkner (As I Lay Dying), and Mistry (A Fine Balance). Some novelists have actively viewed themselves as women writing about women, inserting the perspective of women into the mainstream of literary consciousness. My favorite examples in this category are Alice Munro (Lives of Girls and Women), Toni Morrison (Beloved), Jamaica Kincaid (Annie John), Kate Atkinson (Behind the Scenes at the Museum), Margaret Atwood, Fay Weldon, Isabel Allende, Amy Tan, and countless others, including me—this is a rich treasury! Many novelists have followed Henry James. The enclosed, cultivated world of secure property and inherited privilege that he wrote about has disappeared, but the idea that elite novelists write for elite readers, who are cultivated and astute enough to appreciate complex wordplay, intricate themes, dense, even abstruse, analysis of ideas, and subject matter that will offend the average reader, has not. Vladimir Nabokov, for example, not only wrote Lolita, in which a cultivated older European man abducts a fourteen-year-old girl and takes her over state lines to have sex with her any number of times, he also expressed the urge to write other books he thought might offend American yahoos—the story of a successful interracial marriage that is productive of children and grandchildren and of "the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life and dies in his sleep at the age of 106." Novelists who seem to aim at high art and who disdain, or at least ignore, commercial appeal include Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea), Christina Stead (The Man Who Loved Children), John Gardner (Grendel), Milan

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Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), William Gaddis, Julian Barnes, Will Self, Martin Amis, Jonathan Franzen, and, once again, countless others. The higher goal each novelist aspires to is always portrayed as a form of truth, and his or her art is meant to more clearly express that truth. How the novel is written reveals the basic features of that truth. For example, the heirs of Henry James tend to feel that one of the duties of art is to be unlike life—to be distinct to the point of artificiality and, more important, to express that distinctness in every aspect of the novel. These novelists want readers to be aware at all times that the novel they are reading is a made thing rather than a gratuitous thing and that the author's intentions and choices have shaped what only seems to be resemblance to life. A premium is put not on simplicity or appeals to the universal, but on complexity and intricacy. Few novelists have been unsophisticated enough to declare an allegiance to beauty— the twentieth century was too ironical an age for that—but for beauty they have substituted other sorts of formal integrity that are perhaps more distancing or off-putting than beauty but serve the same purpose of making the novel cohesive and self-referential. Of course, the great unsurpassable model of self-conscious artfulness in the novel is Ulysses. Ulysses is so self-contained and selfreferential that there is a whole mini-industry of writers and scholars whose job is to tell prospective readers that Ulysses is worth getting through and how to get through it. Whether Joyce's novel is worth getting through is the subject of 343 sometimes lengthy customer reviews on the Amazon.com Web site (as opposed to 270 for Moby-Die^, 246 for War and Peace, and only 3 for In Search of Lost Time). Readers' opinions are deeply divided, from "the GREATEST novel ever published" ("monigan") to "if being smart means liking this, count me out" ("pinnick"). The outline of Joyce's plot is simple, and relies on the same principle Tolstoy used for Anna Karenina—two stories are told in parallel, in this case, not two marriages, but two journeys through a single day (June 16, 1904). One Dubliner, middle-aged Leopold Bloom, sets out from home to do some errands, knowing that his wife, Molly, will be entertaining her lover, Blazes Boylan, at their home later in the afternoon and he can do nothing about it. The other Dubliner, Stephen Dedalus, a young teacher whose mother has recently died, teaches his class and receives his pay. His task is to resist, or perhaps give in to, the temptation to spend his money in a profligate manner in the course of the same day. The climax, for the two characters, is when

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they meet and connect, fatherlike and sonlike, Odysseus-like and Telemachus-like, late in the evening. The climax, for the reader, is in the last section, Molly Bloom's soliloquy, addressed not to her latereturning husband but to herself (or the reader). Like Woolf, Joyce was in part interested in depicting consciousness as it had never been depicted before—as a series of momentary impressions and thoughts, often insignificant—as they are processed by his characters. What each character sees and feels and thinks, how he reacts both to himself and to what is around him, is not consistent. Joyce wants to capture the fragmentary and contingent nature of subjective experience, to show that it is not logical and sequential but often arbitrary, with no apparent antecedent and no apparent consequence, that in fact the appearance of cause and effect in something like a plot is pure illusion—if time as it passes through the characters' consciousnesses were broken down into small enough segments, no causes and effects would present themselves, and so, perhaps, there would be no reason to act. This, Joyce seems to be saying, is how life works and why it simply goes on. Bloom is not happy that his wife is entertaining Blazes Boylan, but there are so many distractions in the course of the day, and so many reasons not to make a fuss, including his whole history with his wife, that in the end the only possible choice is to go home to her and be happy to see her. At the same time, his chance meeting with Stephen does have an effect on Stephen—his warm and positive nature contrasts to the coldness of Stephen's own father and provides just a tiny turning point for him, away from dissipation and toward the exercise of talents he knows he has but is in the habit of slighting. But Joyce does not stop with precisely depicting the consciousnesses of each of his three characters—he also, and fairly comprehensively, takes up the history of literature, and uses many different styles and forms to depict the otherwise mundane adventures of his protagonists. Some of these, such as his mimicry of tales of ancient Irish heroes, are virtually incomprehensible. Others require considerable patience on the part of the reader (such as the shift into play format for 180 pages in the middle of the novel). Much of this is so taxing to read that one enthusiastic Amazon.com reviewer suggests not trying to understand it at all, but just letting it wash through, uncomprehended but, presumably, stimulating all the same. Most readers seem to agree that the "truth" Joyce is getting at is that even the most routine sort of day is rich with meaning and implication, and that this is a far truer representation of "life" as it is lived than the more logical and consistent

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characters and plots most novels have to offer. The trouble with this truth is that many readers don't recognize it as true, and aren't motivated to suspend disbelief. The novelist's only recourse, when readers are recalcitrant about participating in this way, is to find them wanting as readers, and many champions of Ulysses do find its detractors wanting, but the difficulty is in using what is a naturally appealing and inclusive art form for exclusive purposes. Is Ulysses artificial in the most absolute way? Yes. Is its very artificiality a higher representation of the way life really is? Maybe. Joyce uses techniques of erudition, wordplay, self-referentiality, and unpredictability to reinforce an impression in the reader that Ulysses is intended to be art. An example of a novel that has a Tolstoyan purpose to promote some sort of social good is Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, the story of Janie and Tea Cake, an older woman and a younger man who fall in love and go off together to work in the Florida Everglades against the advice of Janie's friends, who think Tea Cake is after her for her money. Tea Cake is not respectable, but he is sexy and fun, and Janie knows he loves her. Together, both of them find the companionship they had not found in other marriages or relationships. The climax to the novel, though, is a hurricane in which, while they are escaping, Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog. Janie's last act of love toward him is to see him through the horror of his illness and death, before returning to the life she had left for him. Their Eyes Were Watching God works like most novels with a didactic purpose—it is clearly and dramatically written, the characters are appealing and easy to relate to—in this case, they are earthy, passionate, and well-meaning. At the beginning of the novel, they embark on a learning curve, and what they learn would, it is implied, be beneficial for the reader to learn, also. Like Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend, who begins the novel as a cynical idler and progresses toward becoming a libertine, but learns to love and consider others after he is nearly killed, characters in Tolstoyan novels mature through sometimes harsh tests that might as easily destroy them as save them. Janie's story is meant to demonstrate several things to her friends and to the reader. For one thing, even though Tea Cake's end is horrifying, Janie has no regrets and knows that she has experienced a type of passion she would not have wanted to miss for the sake of mere security or respectability. For another, she returns to her former community with a larger sense of humanity and fewer of the prejudices she once had and that she sees around her. She also knows that she is both strong

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and enterprising, and has no need to act out of fear, as she sometimes had as a young woman. The reader is meant to learn the same lessons about Janie as an individual, but also as a representative of her group, rural black people. Hurston, as a trained anthropologist, was perfectly aware of the power of the novel to open a window for the mainstream reader upon an unknown or unconsidered segment of society, and she was self-conscious about doing so in all of her writings. Her social program was not the same as Tolstoy's—she did not want to remake society in a particular mold—but she did want to correct the misappprehensions of those who demeaned people like her characters. Janie is worthy of respect in many ways, and when she extends her respect and love to Tea Cake, who appears on the surface to be a type of ne'er-do-well rogue, the reader is asked to do the same thing. Like the artful novel, the didactic novel has a characteristic mode of failing. If the artistic novel simply fails to communicate, and therefore in some sense to exist, because it is too forbidding and inaccessible, the didactic novel can be off-putting when it is too prescriptive and not sufficiently descriptive. If the author seems to have shaped the material too strictly in accordance with ideological presuppositions about what is good and what isn't good, the Tolstoyan novel strikes the reader as too simplistic to actually stand on its own as art rather than propaganda. Unfortunately for the highly ideological novelist, ideas change—the first things to die in any novel are those precious social theories that the author labored so intently to understand and incorporate into his work. In Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don, for example, the author's descriptions of the brutality of pre—World War I Cossack village life still strike us as authentic, but the idealized romantic relationship of the two young Communists who meet late in the novel seems false. The first sections are obviously the fruit of long observation by the author. The later section is more of an idea about how a relationship could work than a picture of how many relationships do work. The entry of long-voiceless groups into the literary world of the novel was extremely productive of good and interesting novels in the twentieth century. A paradigmatic example would be Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, which is the artfully told story of how Del, a Canadian girl from a rather eccentric rural Ontario family, finds her literary voice and vocation as she contemplates her various encounters with "the word," on the one hand, and intriguing local women, on the

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other. What is extraordinary about Del's life is not her particular adventures. While her experiences are idiosyncratic, they are more or less like the ordinary experiences of many girls that go unconsidered, fall by the wayside, and come to be known as "life" once they are part of the past. Del's gift is the ability to note them and to recognize that, ordinary as they are, they form a pattern that she can derive meaning from, both as they change her and as they reveal how "life" works. Munro's wonderful gifts of insight and stylistic precision are always descriptive and yet they imply a sort of prescription—given a chance, ordinary girls can make something of their lives and avoid the nagging sense of frustration that other women (such as Del's mother and, in a different way, her aunt and great-aunts) endure throughout their lives. What Munro's novel and other novels like it offer above all things is a sense of authenticity. Whether or not Del is Alice Munro, whether or not Lives of Girls and Women actually tells the story of her upbringing, the novel offers the reader what seems to be felt and considered experience. The experience may be that of a Canadian woman, or it may be that of an African man, as in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, or it may be that of a man writing about a woman, as in Arnost Lustig's Lovely Green Eyes, or it may be that of a woman writing about a man, as in Francine Prose's Guided Tours of Hell. For many women writers, it was Virginia Woolf who gave permission to speak with authority, and twentieth-century literature flourished as a result. Nevertheless, even so simple and justifiable a concept as authenticity causes problems in the novel. When the burden placed upon the novel is that it should always and invariably reflect the "truth," the novel's capaciousness and appeal to the imagination are thereby limited. When authenticity is prized and imagination becomes suspect, a novelist's right to portray anyone outside of his experience is questioned. It is the novel itself, with its alternation between the inner life and action, between the individual and the group, between cause and effect, that highlights the question of authenticity, but whether a novel is "authentic" can only come in terms of willing suspension of disbelief, which only the individual reader can decide. Novels such as Anna Karenina and Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John arouse powerful emotions and also make arguments. Disputes about "truth" are a sign that the arguments they make and the emotions they arouse aren't always in agreement. When the literary culture at large tries to impose an answer by insisting that "authenticity" resides in the sex or the ethnic or national origin

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or biographical experience of the author, it kills the very thing that makes the literary culture vibrant, which is the sense of freedom, vitality, and power the author feels while he is creating his work. I, too, of course, have a theory of art in the novel that grows out of my temperament and circumstances, as well as my experience of reading novels, my observations of how novels work, and the age in which I live. The first aspect of my theory contradicts James and Forster—I consider it fairly unlikely that a great novel will have either a shape or a rhythm. Each of the literary and nonliterary forms that the novel is related to (see chapter 9, "The Circle of the Novel") offers different challenges and different rewards. The more expansive the author tries to be, to give his argument heft and wide application, the more he tries to stake a claim to greatness, then the more likely the novel will expand outside of the capacity of the reader to maintain a sense of the whole. All of the great, long, many-faceted novels tempt the reader to skim here and there—all of them are more like rivers than pools, with rapids here and shallows there and lovely glades and marshy spots. The sense of wholeness and perspective that James and Forster consider to be the highest form of novelistic art gets lost in the expanding and piecemeal experience of reading such a novel. I would assert that the highest novelistic art is in the intensity of that experience, in the reader having the sensation—as I have when I am reading Nikolai Gogol's Taras Bulba—of brilliant phrases, images, insights, observations, sentences, and paragraphs cascading upon me. Or it is in the sharp, painful sense I feel of unrelenting disintegration in The Man Who Loved Children, which is as highly dramatic as Euripides' Medea, but far longer and more sustained. But these novels do not stay in my mind as wholes. The very sparkle of the words, the impact of each stunning phrase dissipates or confuses a larger perception of formal integrity. The greatness of these novels, as of many others, is that the experience can only be reexperienced, never quite remembered or grasped, and yet the experience is so subjective and dependent upon my own circumstances when I am reading that what I think is greatness one time might miss me completely the next time I try it. It is in attempting to elude this very intermittence that Henry James ended up, according to Forster, sacrificing most of life. The novel is not like a painting, or anything tangible, and so, in my opinion, it can't aspire to the sort of formal integrity that tangible objects aspire to.

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My view is that artfulness in the novel lies not in the product, but in the process and in the cultural position of the artist or novelist. The making of art, the writing of a novel requires the artist to exercise free choice in what to depict and how to deploy his materials. Even in societies that don't prize personal and political freedom—let's say in medieval European monasteries, where monks were employed in illuminating manuscripts and what they were supposed to do was prescribed to them, and the techniques they were to employ were taught them—artfulness came in as an expression of individual personality and intention—a particular face or bird or saint might be depicted with a few extra flourishes or with an unusually expressive posture or gesture. It is free choice that is the sine qua non of art. Even when a craftsman (known in the novel-writing business as a "hack") is hired to write a particular story for a particular audience (as, say, series romance novelists are hired to write under pseudonyms), he may bring a certain amount of free choice to the words he employs, the characters he rounds out with idiosyncrasies, or even the themes he touches upon that distinguish his volumes from the others in the series. His motives for introducing his own individuality may not be at all honorable— perhaps he can't help it, or maybe he just does it to give himself a reason to go to work in the morning and stick it to the boss—but it is his sense of agency that is the beginning of art. Societies have only a few basic categories of work, and four of them are government, religion, daily survival, and nurturing the next generation. Each of these functions requires group effort, and in each it is essential that the individual subordinate himself or herself to the discipline of the group. A fifth category, apparently present in almost every human society, is the making of art (including the telling of stories). In this category, idiosyncrasy is prized, in part because art is perceived as play and is supposed to be, for lack of a better word, fun. It is the flourishes and the bonuses, the bits of any story that go beyond what everybody knows, that make it fun. In every other category—government, religion, survival, and reproduction—freedom may or may not be present. History is full of conformity and enslavement in the name of politics, faith, production of food and shelter, and child-rearing. All of these institutions can exist without freedom, but art cannot. "Art" is what institutionalizes the basic freedom to make idiosyncratic use of materials, and therefore what institutionalizes freedom. And then, when an artist can choose his subject matter and shape it as he pleases,

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his freedom is thereby enhanced—when Boccaccio chose to write erotic tales in prose in a manner he thought would be flattering to women (and seductive, no doubt), he had to defend his right to do so, but his exercise of freedom enabled those who admired his work to exercise a similar sort of freedom. And it is significant that Marguerite de Navarre chose to exercise her freedom in order to discuss the strictures placed on women. Because she was a queen, she could do so, but only a few centuries later, women who were not queens at all, women who were simple country girls such as George Eliot, exercised the same sort of freedom. Such freedom in all art is the result of point of view, but in the novel, the importance of point of view is enormously magnified by the voice of the narrator, who must tell the lengthy story from a particular point of view because a story can't be told any other way. As a result, the novel is always about freedom, and readers of novels have an instinctive understanding of whether the novelist is exercising his freedom or whether he isn't—that is, whether he means what he is saying or whether he doesn't—because the novel is based in the most primal human materials, emotion and language. A dilemma that comes up for readers who agree that the novel can do the Tolstoyan thing—promote laudable political goals—is that many novelists use their materials for what some conceive to be bad ends. Since the novel is inherently political, political disagreements abound. Trollope called Dickens "Mr. Popular Sentiment" and thought he was catering to the bad taste of the English middle class. In 1995, when Rohinton Mistry's novel A Fine Balance was short-listed for the Booker Prize, essayist Germaine Gréer, who was on the judging panel, declared that she hated it because it was "wrong"—his depiction of life in Bombay as astoundingly brutal, and even futile, offended her because her own experience of India had been different. When Salman Rushdie was put under a fatwa for The Satanic Verses, not everyone leaped to the defense either of his work or of his freedom to state his point of view—Naguib Mahfouz challenged Rushdie's right to "insult... a prophet or anything considered holy." Canadian novelist and filmmaker Julian Samuel considered Rushdie's critique not radical enough. As he stated in US/THEM: Transition, Transcription and Identity in Post-Colonial Cultures, as well as in the online journal IndiaStar, where I read it, It is a kind of refined and erudite compromise constructed for the soft folds of a safe and international literary aristocracy which

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sees at least one of its aims as the production of a literature heavy, dank and resonant with slickly manipulated surrealism, but with a great deal of it anchored in perfunctory, riskless experimentation. But the fact is, just as Samuel and Greer are entitled to their points of view, the essential nature of Rushdie's art is that he is entitled to his point of view also. People and groups who are primarily political or primarily religious or primarily commercial often consider art to be a tool for the promulgation of ideas and programs or a way to sell a product—that is, they consider art to be a more excellent form of technique. Any sort of appeal to beauty or goodness or truth as the highest expression of art will result in such an idea and a novel, in fact, can have several goals—truth or sales or goodness or beauty. Its goal may be a standard and not very interesting one, conceived by the artist wearing his hat as citizen or acolyte or consumer. Tolstoy's goal for Anna Karenina was to give Russians a lesson in how to be authentically Russian, but art came in by way of Tolstoy's disgust with what he saw around him and his desire to portray it in detail so others could see what he saw; the novel he ended up with is enormously insightful and beautifully written whether Tolstoy's prescriptions convince or not. According to his autobiography, Trollope was writing for money and status, but art came in and created an unsurpassed portrait of the English bourgeoisie that has outlived its creator. The artistic value of any novel depends on its assertion of freedom within the society in which it is created. All societies—all political programs—value conformity and strive to limit freedom, but simple nonconformity is not the antidote; the antidote begins with the sense in the artist's mind that he is engaged in and focused upon the task at hand— let's say choosing a word that seems right and stimulates him. It expands itself as he develops ideas he feels are uniquely his in a manner that satisfies him. It completes itself in the mind of the reader, who apprehends and appreciates the word and the ideas, or does not, who is free to assimilate the author's vision and equally free to reject it. The primary question is not "What's good?" but "What do I think is good?" Any novel-reader can answer this question, and it is inevitable that one good novel will lead to another, that reading many novels, which all inevitably contrast with one another and have different ways of appealing to a reader, will teach her not only what she likes but also what there is to like, and why. The value of art is not in the qualities

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belonging to any particular object but in the freedom that all the objects represent, and the freedom that successive individuals and successive ages possess to esteem, demote, or revive any particular object. Art is the only social system that always carries this freedom, so it is of a value that cannot be overestimated, as it coexists with and counteracts all the other systems that promote conformity. As we survey the shelves at Earth's Biggest Bookstore, we see that this is the one quality shared by every artful decision, every detail we find appealing, every element of every novel that lingers in our memories.

8 • The Novel and History

n the course of this book we have been looking most often at how the novel operates across boundaries of space and time to give the reader a feeling of kinship with a narrator, an author, and characters who are on the surface quite different from her. But it is also true that as we read Boccaccio, Lady Murasaki, and Marguerite de Navarre, we are reminded on every page of how different our world is from theirs, and how different we are from them. In The Tale ofGenji, for example, women of a certain class are always hidden away from men. A woman showing only the sleeves of her robe from beneath the shade that seals her off from the world constitutes an erotic invitation. She might never reveal her face even to her spouse, who in the course of their marriage might see only her hair falling all the way to her feet and in some sense veiling her. And in the sixth story of the third day of The Decameron, as another example, an unscrupulous lover tricks a married woman named Catella into meeting him at a public bath, where, in an unlit room, he pretends to be her husband and makes love to her; she is so heavily veiled that those who might expose his plot and save her don't recognize her. Once Catella realizes that she has been deceived and therefore raped, her rapist prevents her from telling her husband by pointing out that she is thoroughly dishonored and that any confession will result in harm to everyone—the mere fact that he has raped her has ruined her, not him. Boccaccio, who professes to be a friend to women, is sympathetic to Catella's plight, but he can't give her a way of thinking about her betrayal or a way of presenting her case that enables her to go beyond her initial grief and subsequent recognition that her rapist has overcome her and she had better make the best of it. She gives in and agrees to take her rapist as her lover. By contrast, in Arnost Lustig's Lovely Green Eyes, the protagonist, a teenage Jewish girl named "Skinny," must enter a Nazi brothel to

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escape from a concentration camp doctor who is doing murderous experiments on camp inmates. Skinny's survival as a prostitute for German soldiers in World War II is depicted as necessary, full of pathos, and even honorable. One narrative method Lustig employs is indirect discourse—he narrates some of the most painful scenes between Skinny and her tormentors from her point of view, using empathy and a clear, spécifie style to make her consciousness seem normal, though of course terrified, and the behavior of the men seem evil, mad, or inhuman. The result is that rape—what had been portrayed as naturally human by Murasaki and Boccaccio—seems monstrous in Lovely Green Eyes. And it is not only Skinny's honor that survives, but Skinny's sense of herself, her vitality, and her inner life. It never crosses the reader's mind that Skinny should be dismissed as a consciousness because of what is done to her; in fact, her consciousness becomes all the more interesting, all the more potentially representative because Lustig's novel seeks not to judge Skinny, but to reveal how she assimilates her horrifying and identity-killing experiences. Let's say that the intermediate steps between The Decameron and Lovely Green Eyes were The Heptameron (in which the storytellers discuss and question traditional ideas), The Princess of Clèves (in which a woman's dilemma is made sympathetic), Pamela (in which a woman develops her theories and strategy without assistance), The Bride of Lammermoor (in which a woman's dilemma is connected to the conflicting intentions and desires of her family and community), The Portrait of a Lady (in which the consequences of a woman being insufficiently prepared to make her own decisions is explored), Anna Karenina (in which the consequences of adultery for a woman are sympathetically detailed), The Awakening (in which the existential despair of having made the wrong marital choice is displayed sympathetically), Lady Chatterley's Lover (in which a woman is allowed to change her marital choice and supported in her decision by the author), Love in a Cold Climate (in which marital choices and mistakes are seen as comic), Beloved (in which traditional ideas of female virtues are shown to be race- and class-based), and Behind the Scenes at the Museum (in which women's choices, whether capricious or judicious, are seen to have consequences but are not judged). Several paradoxes emerge when we begin to look at our list of a hundred novels as a map of the way stations between Boccaccio's era and our own. One of these is that our list of novels by itself does not offer a road from one political system (monarchy) to another (democ-

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racy). To include these sorts of political changes we would have to include other literary genres, especially the drama. When kings and queens appear in our list of novels (which they rarely do) they are demoted to minor figures with few lines, or they appear in their private capacity. Kings don't fit because the novel is about how persons relate laterally to one another. Essays, philosophical tracts, books on government, perhaps poems, and certainly histories can be about how persons relate hierarchically in the social and political world. Even so, the novel does offer an emotional justification for democracy. Should Sancho Panza, Oroonoko, Moll Flanders, Frankenstein's monster, Queequeg, Tom, Lily Bart, Josef K., Lolita, and Om, in A Fine Balance, really have no say in their own fates? Compared with whom? By what standard? The novel has gotten us from the manners and mores of fourteenthcentury Florence to those of twenty-first-century California, though, and done so by very modest means—not by argument, but by proposing simple, understandable choices about common dilemmas. We've already discussed Pamela and the way that Pamela's choice to defend her virtue grows more resolute and even radical as the plot thickens. All novels work the same way. If we look at Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, we see that at the beginning of the novel, Lily Bart's sense of belonging to a certain social class outweighs, for her, any sense that she might make some sort of damaging or even fatal mistake. She feels uncomfortable in certain ways—as, for example, when she finds herself at the country house of a friend and realizes that she can't afford to play cards for money anymore. The reader can't help being in sympathy with her first little decisions—to deflect the incipient courtship of a wealthy but unappealing mama's boy, and to do a little secretarial work for the friend. When she makes her next decision, which is to allow a rather floridly unattractive married man to speculate in the stock market with some of her money, it's a larger and perhaps somewhat more dangerous decision, but the reader can still see Lily's point of view, and has the sense that with luck, she will get what she wants, which is to retain both her independence and her lifestyle. Of course, Lily does not get what she wants, and her luck runs out, but